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THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS
J - THE JOURNAL OP PHILOSOPHY
PSYCHOLOGY
AND
SCIENTIFIC METHODS
EDITED BY
FREDERICK J. E. WOODBRIDGE
AND
T. BUSH
VOLUME XVII
JANUARY-DECEMBER, 192O
1920
I
n
.
PRESS OF
THE NEW ERA PRINTING COMPANY
LANCASTER, PA.
VOL. XVII, No. 1. JANUARY 1, 1920
THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS
FROM THE COMMON-SENSE LEVEL
A DOZEN years ago we were all tingling with a pleasant excite-
ment, even those of us who were not technically either phi-
losophers or scientists. William James had demonstrated over again
the sisterhood of philosophy and literature by the effectiveness with
which he rescued for us M. Bergson and Mr. Schiller and Mr. Dewey,
and set off the Roman candle of his own Pragmatism, one brilliant
flare hard on the golden path of another. And now James is dead,
and Pragmatism is a memory, and M. Bergson and Mr. Schiller and
Mr. Dewey.
There was a moment when we saw great things in Pragmatism
and Creative Evolution. The natural sciences had become arrogant.
They had begun to deny all kinds of truth but those which were to be
apprehended in one way. It was a relief to find some one who would
point out other modes, define truth in other terms, and open up
again eternal questions by casting salutary doubts upon the intellect
and the way it had been conducting itself.
The sudden vitality of the anti-intellectuals came to many of us
at least from the welcome that greeted the reopening of metaphys-
ical problems. The whole affair was one of metaphysics. The mas-
ters themselves rarely if ever cast doubts on the intellect as a rough
practical tool. And the sudden subsidence came, I believe, from a
perception that amazed no one, apparently, so much as the meta-
physicians themselves that metaphysical speculation had an im-
mediate and sensitive and definitive connection with even the crudest
of affairs in the plane of common-sense, and that common-sense af-
fairs reacted as vitally upon metaphysical speculation. At all events
they were promptly confronted with the amazing spectacle of a meta-
physical philosophy become popular as the movie, and with much
the same clientele. Truth became suddenly easy, being not very dis-
tinguishable from the practises, already very dear to the general, of
"putting it across," or of intuiting it directly and spontaneously.
Every man became his own oracle.
Now it is not quite just to judge a metaphysical philosophy by the
5
6 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
popular perversions of it on the street, though it is, in one sense, to
be judged by its total yield, popular and esoteric. But if Robinson
was not the touchstone, still there was Mr. Dewey with his whole
apparatus writing in the New Republic! Clearly the whole thing
had got out of the metaphysical plane into the practical where it had
never been supposed to. have validity. And the metaphysicians found
themselves put to it to hit upon an answer that would still the pop-
ular disrespect for the practical reason and practical truth to hit
upon an answer, that is, that was not as valid for themselves as it
was for Robinson.
For if their own plea was that they were on the metaphysical
plane, still in the common-sense plane the belief that there was a
truth, real and valid, in relation to which the best practical truth we
could come by was but a stop-gap, was itself a metaphysical affair.
Without that loan from metaphysics there was nothing to make us
ill at ease with our stop-gap, or give us much respect for the intellect
as a thing higher than cunning. If metaphysics robbed us of that
faith by discarding it itself, there was nothing for us but to follow
its example. As for the metaphysician it was a little hard for him
not to feel himself in something of the same dilemma. For though it
may have seemed but a poor defense to say that for him the sense of
an ultimate truth served but as a practical spur to keep him everlast-
ingly at it, still it was a little hard to say what he was everlastingly
after, if not after that. And it was equally hard to say what he was
everlastingly after it with, if not with his intellect. James's own
desperate struggle to put a reasonable face upon it in his supplemen-
tary volume, The Meaning of Truth, was an interesting confession of
this dilemma, regardless of what it said. What it said was, in round-
about effect, a reconstitution of this metaphysical sense of ultimate
truth. And there, to use his brother's phrase, he was.
As to the other non-intellectual form of truth the aesthetic intui-
tion of chaos it was easy enough to see that it might have been
grasped the better without a meddling mind. But it was not so easy
to see that M. Bergson would have been the greater philosopher if
he had had less of his wits about him. It was hard to see that his
philosophy would have emerged at all but for his rational statement
of it, and the tacit accompaniment to every assertion that he made of
the dictum, ''This is true" and true in the metaphysical sense that
his cult was so avid to deny.
In other words, after the first glorious nine days of the anti-
intellectual wonder, it began to be apparent that M. Bergson 's phi-
losophy was still a human affair. If the cat, as might readily have
been believed, could have "intuited" chaos even better than M. Berg-
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 7
son himself, and so have been in that mode the better philosopher of
the two, still we were in an eternal difficulty about the cat from his
refusal to tell what it was like. Jean Christophe, after his return to
Paris, finding a new school of music sprung up in his absence, went
on composing in his old manner, putting into his score tremendous
meanings which no one but he could understand, and which he him-
self could express in no other way. And so he died, a saddened old
man. This may, indeed, have been the care that killed the cat. But
even of this we can only surmise. The cat remained silent, feline.
M. Bergson, however, was human, and though he obviously had intu-
itions of chaos, his utterances were philosophy by virtue of his attempt
to tell what it was like by virtue of the thing he piqued himself on
upsetting the dialectic search for truth by aid of the intellect.
All this, however, is beside the point or would be but that with
the subsidence of the anti-intellectuals the human situation is pretty
much where it was before. Not quite, indeed. Since then natural
science has been a little less assured of its metaphysical competence.
On the other hand human nature on the common-sense level which
also lies outside the bailiwick of science and which looked hopefully
for a moment to be rescued finds itself rather more hopelessly cap-
tive than ever. The sense of truth still to seek, indeed, but none the
less there, somewhere, to be struggled for with all the resources of a
clarified intellect has weakened. The putters across of anything
that will work, and the bright army of sestheticists with chaos at their
finger-tips sorry enough perverters of the doctrines that set them
up, it is true have none the less discredited still further the humane
discipline. Science, however, has gone on with the momentum of a
tremendous validity in its own right, while nothing since the felo de
se of anti-intellectualism has had enough weight to counter the en-
croachments which old scientific habits of thought never ceased to
make on the human preserves. From the humane point of view the
whole fight is still to make.
The smile of the humanist has been but a sorry affair for four or
five decades, but not for want of matter to smile at. His scientific
masters have sometimes risen to high comedy. There was the virtue
of humility, for example. That virtue, with which the golden age of
Huxley, Tyndall, and Clifford ushered in the evolutionary movement,
had two aspects. One was the humility forced upon the race when
we found ourselves not the center of creation but a fortuitous detail
of it ; the other was the personal humility of the patient investigator
in the presence of a great task to which his own contribution could
at best be but infinitesimal.
To the first of these humilities the scientific response was to rebuke
8 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
metaphysics, spinning its airy dreams out into the void, for its pre-
sumption, and to overthrow theology, lifting man to the supreme
place in creation, for its arrogance. Then promptly, this done, it
spun an airy metaphysical dream of its own out into the void the
mechanical universe and the reign of law and projected a cosmology
which elevated, on the whole, the scientist to the supreme seat. As
for relative humility, the older theological cosmology had a god at
the center of it in relation to whom personal humility was often more
observable in Dante, say, or a Kempis than it was in Clifford or
Haeckel. To sit at the pinnacle of a metaphysical structure and look
down with contempt at one's self is not altogether humiliating. At
all events the newer dreamers did rather strut through the latter half
of the nineteenth century.
Something of the habit of looking down from this metaphysical
pinnacle affected the scientific humility in the second aspect of that
virtue. For if the scientist became humble in respect to the great-
ness of his task, and patient and painstaking in his procedure to
this there is no cavil he promptly became arrogant enough in his
human relations. This took first expression in his defining his task
not from the point of view of science itself, but from the point of view
of the metaphysical dream. Science itself, it is obvious, defined by
its own principles, extends no farther than its own experimental
verifications have taken it. The metaphysical dream, however, has
pictured it as one day bringing within the range of mechanical ex-
planation the whole human scene, from the pageant of history down
to the last delicate inclination of a philosopher's sense of humor, and
binding it all up in the covers of a mighty physics text-book. The
difference is colossal and obvious, but the giants of the nineteenth
century apparently were blind to it. There can hardly be anything
more naive in the documents of the mind than Spencer's little essay,
What Knowledge Is of Most Worth? with its complacent conclusion,
falling with the solemnity of doomsday, at the close of each para-
graph. As a piece of special pleading it is admirable. As the utter-
ance of a mind that held in contempt all belief that was not experi-
mental it may cause a smile which science, even yet, apparently, can
not account for. The humility of science in defining its colossal task,
at least, is not observable.
None the less the spell of this metaphysical dream has been so
potent that science has come to be considered, as it has considered
itself, the intellectual arbiter and court of final appeal of modern life
in its humane aspects. And it has assumed this jurisdiction without
even a pretense that it has already mastered the data of this humane
life or established a discipline for it. Now however trivial the
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 9
ephemeral affairs of every-day existence, played upon as they are by
gusts of feeling and transient desire, may seem to the metaphysician
or scientist, the metaphysician at least will acknowledge that ethics
is a legitimate part of philosophy. He may even go so far as to
believe that the final test of a philosophy is its susceptibility to hav-
ing an ethics founded upon it. For even he will not have settled
once for all whether philosophy exists for the sake of life, or life for
the sake of philosophy. One or the other of these relations, however,
he is likely to favor. In either case an ethics will be a part of his doc-
trine. If philosophy exists for the sake of life, ethics will be the
flower of his system. If the reverse, it will be the establishment of
values by which philosophy is held in its supreme place. At least he
will remember that in point of time men are human before they are
either philosophers or scientists, and that if philosophy and science
exist it is because of some sanction in the moral code of life on the
common-sense level.
It is credible that such an acknowledgment has not been made by
men of science because they have not worked out an ethics on their
own data to point out the need of an ethics. The point is subtly
vertiginous. It anchors itself stably enough, however, at the recol-
lection that an ethics is not to be had on the data of science. The
human consciousness, its desires, and the sense of relative values
the stuff of ethics mark just the point at which positive science has
stopped frustrate. Even to the metaphysical dream of a reign of
law the prosperity of a tubercle bacillus to take a case which touches
science nearly is as precious as the prosperity of the host. If the
scientist takes sides with the host he does it as a man, not as a scien-
tist. Even the merit of a disinterested curiosity that the "pure"
scientist piques himself on if he rises above taking sides is based on
an ethics that he has borrowed from another system of thought.
Science has indeed been a blithe borrower. From metaphysical
method it has borrowed the imaginative liberty to project its dream
of a mechanical universe and refused to return it. More specifi-
cally it has borrowed its fundamental hypothesis of the uniformity
of nature, without which the whole of its experimental method would
be futile. From humanism it has borrowed the values of its pursuit
the merits of its disinterested love of truth, and of its contribution
to human happiness, and the virtues of its patience, its thoroughness,
and its humility ! And with these borrowings it has managed to assert
its intellectual sufficiency to be the arbiter of modern life, forgetful
or perhaps too innocent to know that the very claim to such a posi-
tion lies in the humane field.
The prompt response of science to all such considerations is to re-
10 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
treat once more to its dream of the mechanical universe and the reign
of law. It pictures immutable necessity as functioning relentlessly,
in spite of our puny desires and futile values, and determining irre-
vocably every status and every motion from the courses of the stars
down to the existence of these desires and these values themselves.
And it pictures itself as in some way identical with that thorough-
going process. It need not. The reign of law, granting its existence,
will go on, caring nothing for the solicitude of science. And if the
human consciousness is after all but the mechanical product of this
law, still science is but the product of the consciousness. It builds
up from that end, and not down from the other. It is answerable
thus to the consciousness, answerable, that is, to the orientation of life
.as that consciousness views it.
Incidentally it is this point that science itself is a detail in the
moral orientation of life, a body of useful practical knowledge when
looked at from one angle, or a field for the disinterested play of an
intellectual curiosity when looked at from another it is this point
that bears quizzically upon the fortunes of science. Whether it will
or no, science can not get quit of its subordination. There have been
periods when it has not been very highly valued in the hierarchy of
ethical values, and in those periods it has not been very much pur-
sued. The Middle Ages we usually look upon as such a period.
There are civilizations to-day, such as they are, that do not value it.
Tahiti does not care much for it and it is not much cultivated there.
Various civilizations value it for various things. The Middle West
in America cares more for it as a practical body of knowledge than
as a field of disinterested curiosity, and supports it more heartily in
that direction. We are interested just now in the belief that there
have been recent civilizations that have valued it very highly, but
wrongly. The Great War with its scientific development of the
modes of destruction, and the social unrest at the scientific develop-
ment of industry are symptoms that are significant.
It is not impossible that our own evaluation of science may go
astray. Scientific development to the neglect of an ethical and
evaluating discipline faces the threat of the vicious circle. Science
may be guilty of a felo de se as effective as that of anti-intellectual-
ism itself.
Meantime poor human nature, from which both philosophy and
natural science take their impulse, grows rank for want of garden-
ing. Anti-intellectualism could not help ; the needed regimen is in-
tellectual a process of dealing reasonably with the data of human
desire and humane values. Science can not help, for science is help-
less with those intangible premises. If science itself should begin to
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS IS
suffer from its failure to see its own safeguard in a moral hierarchy,
and so deprive human nature of one of its chief instruments, the
human garden will be in a bad way indeed. What the description of
that hierarchy should be, and by what discipline it should be restored,
are, of course, eternal questions. But that those questions are a
challenge to the intellect, on the one hand, and on the other that the
intellect as science uses it is not in a way to answer them, are per-
turbing considerations to those who, from outside, have watched the
philosophical movements of the last two decades with a jealous con^
cern for a proportionate conception of life.
SHERLOCK BRONSON GASS.
UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA.
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL BASIS OP VALUES
TT)ECENTLY there have appeared in this JOURNAL several articles
-- in discussion of the questions: What is the nature of values
and of valuation? and, What objects are valued? These questions
have been dealt with in fresh and concrete fashion, far removed
from the complex and formal dogmatism of the German schools of
value-philosophy. The latest contributions to the discussion come
from Professors Bush 1 and Dewey. 2 It is because the writer believes
that these articles did not reach a common ground, that he ventures
to attempt to make a few rough places plain, and to sketch the out-
line of a theory (developed more fully elsewhere 3 ) of the psycholog-
ical basis of values, which is designed to clear away many misunder-
standings.
I
I purpose first to state several differences of opinion among the
views of Professors Bush, Dewey, and Urban. 4
1. What values are fundamental? Professor Urban answers:
"It need scarcely be said that an ultimate definition of value is con-
cerned only with intrinsic value, all extrinsic or instrumental values
going back ultimately to concepts of intrinsic value." Professor
Dewey does not explicitly refuse the name ' ' value ' ' to intrinsic, im-
mediate goods, but uses it for himself almost entirely in reference to
instrumental values. He does this, because he wishes to emphasize
1 < ' Value and Causality, ' ' this JOURNAL, Vol. XV., No. 4, 1918.
2 "The Objects of Valuation," ibid., Vol. XV., No. 10, 1918.
3 ' ' Values, Immediate and Contributory, and Their Interrelation, " N. Y.
Univ. Press, 1919 (in press).
* "Value and Existence," this JOURNAL, Vol. XIII., No. 17, 1916.
12 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
the indeterminate character of many intrinsic goods. To call im-
mediate goods "values" seems to him to grant that these values are
"completely there for knowledge, provided only we could get at
them. ' ' Professor Bush recognizes two classes of values, the one, im-
mediate, intrinsic, and independent, to be contrasted with the other,
mediate, instrumental, and dependent.
2. Under what conditions does intrinsic valuation take place?
Professor Bush believes that "independent values are, so to speak,
the premises of specific value syllogisms. They can not be criticized
while they remain premises ..." Professor Dewey believes that
"there are situations wherein the adequate data for settling a de-
terminate like and dislike can not be had until after an act which
issues from a preliminary estimate or valuation as to what the good
will be. ' ' Professor Bush believes that intrinsic values apply to the
present; Professor Dewey thinks that they are often ends to be ar-
rived at through future experience.
3. Special theses of these writers are :
Bush: Value is to be distinguished from causality by the presence
in the former of the bias or interest of a living creature.
Dewey : Immediate goods are not all given ' ' in the sense of being
completely there for knowledge provided only we could get at them. ' '
We may make mistakes in ' ' settling ' ' likes and dislikes if we try to
determine them apart from the consequences of the specific situa-
tions in which they arise.
To one who compares the articles of Professors Bush and Dewey,
it would seem that their authors are less concerned with finding a
broad and fundamental standpoint and with reconciling differences
of opinion, than with establishing individual propositions. Pro-
fessor Bush's article gives the more comprehensive viewpoint. He
states the condition of the existence of value, namely, the presence
of bias or interest of a living organism. He then distinguishes two
separate classes of values, immediate and instrumental, and gives
characteristics of each class which serve to contrast it with the other.
Thus, immediate values are "independent," related to the present,
given as good or bad, friendly to beauty and esthetics. Instrumental
values, on the other hand, are dependent, related to the future,
judged and criticized, friendly to usefulness and ethics. It is not
evident from his article whether Professor Dewey is willing to recog-
nize a class of immediate values that are related to the present and
given as good or bad irrespective of judgment. He does say, how-
ever, that some intrinsic goods can be established as goods only at
some future time, the implication being that these intrinsic values
are not independent of the future. He also makes these values de-
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 13
pendent, not only upon the future, but also upon a provisional judg-
ment which leads to an act whose consequences determine these in-
trinsic goods. These goods are "brought into existence" only when
by actual experiment I determine the value of the consequences of
my action. My attitude of liking or disliking the consequences of an
action can not always be determined before the action has taken
place. Apparently Professor Dewey would not care to recognize
sudden or temperamental likings and dislikings as intrinsic values.
He seems to feel that to be dignified by the name "value" they must
prove their worth in the experience of the individual.
From the last observation, it would appear that Professors Bush
and Dewey use the word "value" in different meanings. Professor
Dewey would associate it only with goods that are judged as means
or ends. Professor Bush would apply it also to cases of liking and
disliking where no judgment is made as to whether the value is
justified. I believe that the use of "value" to describe my relation
to objects that I like, dislike, desire, want, wish, etc., is sufficiently
widespread to give good reason for its retention in this broader sense.
1 shall therefore speak of my most idle fancy for an object, inde-
pendently of whether it is worthy or unworthy in reference to a
standard, or of whether I shall retain it after further consideration
of experience with it, as of immediate value.
With Professor Dewey, however, I shall distinguish between the
functional aspect of instrumentalism in the judgment, and the aspect
of instrumental character of the content of the same judgment.
When it is said that the judgment "I must go to see my physician"
is functionally instrumental, it is meant that the very act of judg-
ing is instrumental in causing me to pay the visit. This is quite dis-
tinct from the usefulness or uselessness of my visit itself in effecting
my cure.
II
After this preliminary discussion, I may proceed to sketch certain
relevant aspects of a detailed theory of values. Previous attempts to
formulate a theory of values in an empirical way have plunged in
medias res with little regard for any fundamental principles under-
lying this research. The time is ripe for a thorough discussion of
the more elementary principles of a value philosophy. Such work
has been confined hitherto to the German schools of value philosophy
and their American representatives. Rickert and Windelband are
notable examples of those who have erected a value philosophy on
the basis of transcendentalism. No thoroughgoing analysis of values
and valuation from a strictly empirical standpoint has yet appeared.
In this brief paper it would not be possible to give an exposition of
14 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
such a philosophy. I shall confine myself to a few observations that
may clear away some differences of opinion expressed in the two
articles under discussion.
My remarks will concern two topics: I. The psychological basis
of values. II. The relation of values to knowledge.
I. THE PSYCHOLOGICAL BASIS OP VALUES
Professor Bush has well distinguished a causal from a value situ-
ation 'by saying that the latter requires the (presence of the bias or
interest of a living creature. Metaphysically, perhaps, it might be
maintained that a universe of minerals and plants contains intrinsic
values objects that are good or bad in themselves without reference
to any living creature. From the empirical point of view, however,
such a proposition appears highly absurd. We find things good or
bad ; we admire or despise them ; we may think of them as to-be-liked
or to-be-disliked ; but the reference to a living interest is always ap-
parent. If, in certain cases, we tend to hypostasize the attractive-
ness, give it an "over-personal" reference, and say that norms of
beauty and morality exist in and for themselves as well as for us, we
pass from an empirical to a metaphysical standpoint. The only em-
pirical evidence in favor of such a theory would be a consensus of
opinion among human individuals. But the great majority of our
likes and dislikes can not so be universalized. All immediate values,
on the other hand, are found empirically to be related to a human
interest. It is therefore incumbent upon the empiricist to deal with
these values from the standpoint of interest, and to reserve the cases
of disputed values for separate discussion.
So in the case of instrumental or contributory values, it is quite
superfluous to say that, since the rain is contributory to the growth
of crops, rain is of contributory value apart from all human inter-
est. Such a statement is superfluous because the word "causality"
sufficiently expresses the mentioned relation between rain and crops.
It is least confusing to keep the word "value" for situations where
human interest, or the interest of some other living creature, is in-
volved. By such a procedure we shall steer clear of many a meta-
physical subtility and find it more possible to formulate a theory of
values which shall be wholly empirical.
If we recognize the distinction of Professor Bush between value
and causality, we shall, nevertheless, find it undesirable to employ
one of the adjectives which he uses to designate immediate values.
The word "independent" is too indefinite to be satisfactory. By his
own distinction, all values are dependent upon ' ' the ego-centric situ-
ation." We shall, therefore, confine our designation of this class of
values to the words "immediate" and "intrinsic."
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 15
For the purpose of a fundamental separation of two classes of
values, the time-distinction of Professor Bush is somewhat confus-
ing. He holds that immediate values relate to the present, contribu-
tory values, to the future. Professor Dewey criticizes this distinc-
tion on the ground that many immediate values also have to await
the future before becoming ''settled." That is, I may not be able
really to tell whether I like or dislike an object or action until I
learn the consequences that it will carry with it. It may be remarked
that Professor Dewey apparently uses the term "immediate value"
in the sense of "known immediate value" and "permanent immedi-
ate value. ' ' This is a narrower application of the term than that em-
ployed by Professor Bush, who would, I think, admit into the cate-
gory of values momentary likings and dislikings. Professor Dewey
inclines to a eulogistic use of the term "value." He seems to feel
that "value" connotes stability. I think that Professor Bush would
interpret Professor Dewey 's example as one in Which an entirely
new immediate value had arisen. He would say that the citizen who
revised his former sentiment as to the immediate value of the chil-
dren's parade in Syracuse, by coming to believe that it was pro-
ductive of more harm than good, did not by so doing "settle" an
immediate value, but gained a new one. He might even reconsider
the matter, come to believe that after all the parade was on the
whole a good thing, and feel a liking for it. He would then experi-
ence a third immediate value in relation to the same object of con-
sideration.
I believe, however, that the difference of opinion on this point
between Professors Bush and Dewey is chiefly one of standpoint.
Any time distinction between values may be regarded from either of
two angles. Professor Bush thinks of valuing from the standpoint of
the individual who values. Every act of valuing, at the moment of
occurrence, is a present act, but there is a distinction between im-
mediate and contributory values by which the former, given as good
or bad, find their whole meaning in the present of the valuing in-
dividual, whereas the latter are referred by the individual to some
future act. Professor Dewey regards valuing from the standpoint
of an observer. He considers a value instrumental only when it
becomes justified as such in the course of experience. He applies the
same thought to immediate valuation. In view of the confusion aris-
ing from this diversity of standpoints, it seems to me to be wiser not
to press the time distinction as an elementary difference between im-
mediate and contributory values.
Thus far I have tried only to clear the ground of metaphysical
assumptions and undesirable distinctions. Now that two distinct
16 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
classes of values have been differentiated, we may inquire where we
are to go to obtain the elements of an empirical account of values.
Where if not chiefly to psychology ? We have seen that values and
valuation are never apart from the bias or interest of a living crea-
ture. We shall not discover the nature of values by exclusive con-
sideration of objects and their effects, or acts and their consequences,
but by consideration of the relation of living creatures to objects and
acts which are valued. Furthermore, in an empirical account, we
must not fall into the snare pointed out by Professor Dewey of as-
suming that values are somehow all given to conscious activity in ad-
vance, for then we should be led into transcendental speculations
which are wholly metaphysical in character. We must rather regard
them for what they are in experience, namely, relations of living
creatures to objects and acts.
It might be urged that instead of a psychological account we
should undertake a classification of various types of value relations.
It is easy, for instance, with the use of the nomenclature of modern
objective idealism and of neo-rationalism, to describe contributory
values as triadic, immediate values as dyadic, relations. But while
this is 'a useful task in later study, it fails to mark that which will
distinguish triadic and dyadic relations of value from other triadic
and dyadic relations. Moreover, it takes no account of the different
manner in which the term ' ' living creature ' ' enters into relations of
the two classes of values. An abject or act remains the same, how-
ever it be valued ; if there be a fundamental difference, it must occur
in the term "conscious activity." And when we seek the deter-
mining factor in some difference of relation to conscious activity, we
are led to psychology.
Of late yeai*s the tendency among psychologists has been strong
in the direction of treating conscious activity as unitary, rather than
as split up into a number of "faculties." There is current a morbid
fear of using language that suggests the notion of a "consciousness"
which is a container, holding three quarts of faculties. We must
avoid this pitfall, but we need not go to the other extreme of denying
that there are different aspects of conscious activity, each of which,
while never present without the others, is yet distinct in character.
Cognition and feeling are examples of such aspects of conscious
activity. There is never the faintest feeling from which cognition
is wholly absent, nor is there ever a "pure" thought which is un-
attended by a fringe of feeling. And yet feeling is not thought ; the
two are quite distinct functions of conscious activity.
Now I believe that the psychological basis of immediate values is
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 17
to be found in the aspect of feeling, and that of contributory values,
:.n the aspect of cognition. This assignment follows from empirical
observation. For what words do we employ when we speak of an
immediate value? Do we not use "like," "dislike," "desire,"
"wish," "demand," "want," "love," "hate," etc.*! These words
all have an emotional connotation, predominant over the cognitive
and will aspects of consciousness. On the other hand, when we speak
cf an instrumental value, we declare that an object or act is "good
for something." The pen is good for writing; apples are good for
food. In thus relating objects or acts to other objects or acts, the
feeling aspect is at a minimum ; the mental operation is chiefly cog-
nitive, descriptive rather than appreciative. I may consume a cus-
tard in the belief that it is good for nourishing my body, at the same
time that I heartily dislike or am quite indifferent to its flavor.
Empirically, therefore, it is possible to establish the feeling
aspect of conscious activity as a term in immediate value relations,
and the cognitive aspect, as a term in contributory values. A thor-
ough study of values on this psychological basis and in connection
with biological facts is productive of a theory of the interrelations
of values which is wholly empirical in its nature. In this paper, I
can but hint of its application to knowledge, a portion of the dis-
cussion which has proved especially difficult of reconciliation in the
articles of Professors Bush and Dewey.
II. THE RELATION OF VALUES TO KNOWLEDGE
Both Professor Bush and Professor Dewey assume that immedi-
ate as well as contributory values have to do with judgment. The
former regards immediate values as "the premises of specific value
syllogisms;" the latter disputes this assertion, and speaks of "set-
tling a determinate like and dislike. ' ' Both of these writers appar-
ently believe that in order to value immediately one must know that
he values immediately. I believe that it is because of such an as-
sumption that many of the tangles of value philosophy have arisen.
I shall endeavor to show that it is not necessary to judge when we
value in either an immediate or a contributory fashion.
First we may take the case of contributory values. Suppose that
a man, while plowing a field for cultivation, meets with a great stone
which he can not lift or remove. Looking about, he sees a dead
branch, takes it in his hands, places one end under the stone, and
with the branch as a lever rolls it to one side of the field. It is quite
valid to say that the branch and the force exerted by the man were
the chief cause of the moving of the stone. But, as Professor Bush
points out, when the interest of a living creature enters into a causal
18 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
situation, we distinguish the situation from one where causality alone
is present by calling it a value-situation. We therefore say, more
properly, that the branch was valuable to the man for the purpose
of moving the stone, and we speak of the branch as of contributory
value to him. In this case, however, the man did not necessarily
make some such judgment as, "I can move the stone with this
branch." His action was the outcome of a cognitive progress, but
cognition did not necessarily reach to judgment before he performed
the act. He may have experimented in hit-or-miss fashion in many
ways before he found a useful means. After the act, he may have
made a judgment based on his past experience, such as, "A branch
is a good thing for moving a stone. ' ' That he may at some past time
have made a similar judgment, and -that he might have been led to
the action after making such a judgment, are quite irrelevant to the
fact that he actually did make use of the branch without judging.
In the hypothetical instance, he has verified a contributory value,
but not a judgment of contributory value. Granted that he used
perception, some memory, discrimination, and other elementary cog-
nitive processes, he yet did not judge. But inasmuch as the act itself
was the employment of a means to an end that interested a living
being, we must not refuse the title "value" to it, but we must say
that the branch was of contributory value to him in the act itself,
even though he made no judgment of what he was going to do.
Whether the cognitive process flowered into a judgment before the
act is immaterial to the presence of the contributory value.
It is thus evident that contributory values, demanding only the
presence of a living interest in a means to an end which may be
satisfied with much less than judgment do not require a judgment
to bring them into existence. They do require elements of cogni-
tion, for cognition is their psychological basis, and interest in a
means to an end can not exist without it. In the great majority of
cases where we use objects or acts for some end, the logical status
of the situation is not formulated consciously in judgment. I sit
down to write a letter, but do not first say to myself, "My pen is
good for writing; the paper is good to write upon." I would be
more likely to make such judgments if I were questioned about my
use of pen and paper, or if I found some difficulty in using these
media. And since the term "value" is not to be restricted to the
conscious activity of human beings, but is to be used of all living
creatures where interest is possible, we may say truly that twigs are
of contributory value to birds in building their nests assuming, of
course, that animals are not unconscious automata, but that they are
possessed of rudimentary cognitive processes.
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 19
Immediate values also are not dependent for their presence upon
judgment. I have argued that their psychological basis is to be
found in the feeling or affective side of conscious activity. The
relation which constitutes an immediate value, therefore, is a rela-
tion between an object or act and the feeling side of conscious
activity. So far as immediate value is concerned, any elements of
cognition in conscious activity are to be left out of account entirely.
I like the taste of peaches. By my very feeling of liking, the
peaches become of immediate value to me. Smoking and playing
tennis are acts which I enjoy. They are therefore of immediate
value to me. It is not necessary for me to formulate any judgment
such as, "I like peaches" in order for me to enjoy their taste. Just
in so far as there is present the feeling of liking, there is also
present the immediate value.
This simple way of distinguishing between immediate and con-
tributory values makes it possible to avoid many false complications.
One of the chief sources of confusion in value philosophy has arisen
from the fact that it is possible to make judgments of immediate
values. It is supposed by some writers that, because I can talk about
my likes and dislikes, the judgments that I may make about them
have to do with the actual values themselves. This I emphatically
deny. To make the matter clear, I may choose an example. An
individual says, "I like peaches." We must separate carefully
several elements of the situation where this judgment is made.
First, there is the act itself of judging. This element, which, as I
understand him, is what Professor Dewey would call the "func-
tional" aspect of judgment, is to be considered and interpreted, in
terms of value, in connection with judging in general. I hold to
the view of Professor Dewey that all the cognitive processes are
functionally instrumental in character. Thus the act itself of
judging will be of contributory value to the individual. Secondly,
there is to be considered the content of the judgment. This content
may itself be of contributory value. Just to what degree this will
be true will depend upon its future usefulness. Perhaps the in-
dividual spoke the words in a company. The result may be that
when he again visits these friends they will give him peaches for
desert. Thirdly, we must take account of the fact that the in-
dividual expressed in judgment a fact of immediate value. This
will mean no more than that between the peaches and the affective
side of his conscious activity there is a relation of immediate value.
Provided the liking was there, the fact of immediate value would
also be there, regardless of whether he made a judgment con-
cerning it.
20 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
III
From the above discussion of the elementary nature of values,
it may be seen that the adoption of such a psychological basis of
values opens up a broad field of investigation. First, there is the
problem of the origin of values. When does an individual begin to
value? Or, in other words, when can we say that more is present
than causality in the relation of a living organism to its environ-
ment? These questions demand biological, as well as psychological
treatment.
Again, another important branch of the subject has to do with
the interrelation of values in respect to knowledge. Here, distin-
guishing between standpoints of the individual and of an observer,
we must determine what values are related to each standpoint, and
how the individual himself may, in the course of evolution, come to
observe by making his own judgments. Interesting questions also
arise as to the values of true and false judgments. It is susceptible
of proof that some false judgments are of contributory value.
Another fertile field of investigation has to do with the inter-
relation of immediate and contributory values in the experience of a
mature individual. Since conscious activity is always both cognitive
and affective, objects and acts are valued at the same time in both
an immediate and a contributory way. Due to this fact are many
interrelations of coexistent values. This topic also demands bio-
logical treatment, and a consideration of the relation of man to his
environment in terms of value.
Finally, when an empirical theory of values has been developed,
it is desirable to make a careful analysis of the transcendental
speculations of Rickert, Windelband, Miinsterberg, and others, in
order to determine just where their views diverge from an em-
pirical account of values.
In consideration of the foregoing programme and from his own
meditation on these subjects, the writer believes that the study of
values, far from having been completed in the existing literature,
is yet in its youth. MAURICE PICARD.
GENERAL THEOLOGICAL SEMINABT.
REVIEWS AND ABSTRACTS OF LITERATURE
Rousseau and Romanticism. IRVING BABBITT. Boston: Houghton,
Mifflin Co. 1919. Pp. xxiii-f-426.
There was once upon a time a classic art, inspired by men of the
type of Aristotle, or even better Buddha, and one may add Christ.
This art was ''highly imaginative;" only this imagination was kept
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 21
within bounds by " reason," " decorum," " judgment," " common
sense. " After many centuries, however, the last named tried to raise
its head again to put a stop to the orgy of " emotional individual-
ism;" this movement of sound reaction crystallized and assumed the
form of Neo-classicism. But Neo-classicism would not do, for this
reason that it banished " fancy," or " imagination" altogether, as
being so they thought incompatible with ' * judgment. ' ' Then came
what Professor Babbitt calls "Rousseauism" or "Romanticism,"
which is a reaction against that Neo- or Pseudo-classicism. The
remedy proved more dangerous than the evil; indeed this remedy
was most terrible according to Professor Babbitt, who hurls to-day
his fourth volume against the monster : so, if this ' ' menace to civili-
zation" as Romanticism is called repeatedly is not avoided, nobody
surely can blame Professor Babbitt. The last volume is the most
formidable that has come yet from the pen of the Harvard professor ;
but the ammunition seems to be inexhaustible, and there is no reason
why this should be the last volume if the Hindenburg Line of Rous-
seauism still dares to resist.
Let the reader not imagine that this is a mere figure of speech.
No indeed : for, after having shown Rousseau or Rousseauism as the
evil force behind Chateaubriand, Musset, Hugo, Baudelaire, Renan,
Goethe, Schiller, Schlegel, Wordsworth, Byron, Blake, etc., etc., etc.
(as a matter of fact, it would be shorter to tell those who are not
infected, and our author is perfectly neutral in administering his
blows) Professor Babbitt arrives through Preraphaelites, Ruskin,
Tolstoi, Nietzsche, Pragmatism, Neo-realism, Bergsonism, to "Kul-
tur;" what civilization fought behind the Hindenburg Line was
Rousseauism; the megalomania of the Kaiser was Rousseauism; the
Big Bertha was, if not the direet product of Rousseauism, at least
that of Baconianism with which Rousseauism is closely connected.
' * If men had not been so heartened by scientific progress they would
have been less ready, we may be sure, to listen to Rousseau when he
affirmed that they were naturally good" (p. 122; cf. 63, 64, 119,
345). Or again : "The attitude of the Romanticist to make of nature
the mere plaything of his mood" is "closely connected with the de-
humanizing of man by science that is reflected in a whole literature
during the last half of the nineteenth century for instance in so-
called 'impassive writers' like Flaubert and Leconte de Lisle"
(p. 299).
Professor Babbitt is surely an interesting case : fully 360 out of
400 pages are devoted to demolishing purposes and the forty left do
not propose to offer any original doctrine. 1 The author in his de-
i One of the last Kousseauists, according to Professor Babbitt, is Bergson,
and it is in discussing Bergson that the author 's own belief comes out as clearly
22 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
structive fanaticism reminds one a little of the French poetess Mme.
Ackerman, who had found all sorts of reasons for not believing in
God, but could not let him go, for she would have missed him so much
as a target for her imprecations ; or, even more of Flaubert, who was
heartily disgusted with Mr. Homais and the "bourgeois," but was so
fascinated by them that he spent the best of his energies analyzing
and savagely attacking them. Why he never occupied his mind with
gentlemen that satisfied his own heart, is as hard to explain as why
Professor Babbitt does not write books on Aristotle, or Buddha, or
Christ. It must be the case of the bird flying right into the mouth
of the monster snake that terrifies it and perhaps fascinates it.
It must be that. For, otherwise, one could not see how a man of
the indisputable dialectic power of Professor Babbitt would use, at
times, arguments so easy and so unconvincing as, e. g., that of Cha-
teaubriand, "quite overcome by his own uniqueness and wonderful-
ness," or Hugo "positively stupefied at the immensity of his own
genius." Such eloquence may be pardonable in University Exten-
sion lectures, but produces a rather painful impression in a book
meant for serious reading. Even more are we surprised to find Pro-
fessor Babbitt spend so much time on the argument that ' ' the belief
that the latest thing is the best ' ' is absurd. We could forgive Wolsley
for saying in 1686: "Every ass that's romantic believes he is in-
spired" in 1919 it is a waste to devote so many pages to the devel-
opment of such a truism. Elsewhere we simply can not believe that
Professor Babbitt did not understand that there is some beauty after
all in Chanticler's refusal to give up his faith that he can have a
share in bringing about some of the light and beauty of the world.
And is it not surprising that Professor Babbitt should not take cum
grano salis Musset's "Vive le melodrame ou Mar got a pleurc," but
prefers to take the attitude of a methodist minister 1 ? Again, is it
altogether fair to abuse Chateaubriand, and Rousseau, and the Ro-
manticists alone, because they express regret at not having conquered
their passions: what of Saint Paul's: "the good which I would, I
do not, but the evil which I would not, that I do," or of Ovid's
Meliora probo sed deteriora sequor Ovid, dear to Professor Bab-
bitt's heart?
Many, many more remarks of this kind could be added. But
enough has been said with regard to the methods of Professor Bab-
bitt which does not prevent his book from being at times very
stimulating and suggesting altogether a lofty view of life. Taking
as anywhere: to the Intuitionism of Bergson, he wants to oppose "Insight" (p.
372) "insight into the universal" if you please (p. 18). He calls his idea also
"complete Positivism" (p. x) ; and it means the mediocritas aurea between
judgment and fancy.
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 23
now the volume for what it purports to 'be, chiefly destructive, let us
examine 'briefly, first Professor Babbitt's attitude towards Rousseau,
and then Professor Babbitt's attitude towards Romanticism.
The Attitude towards Rousseau. Professor Babbitt admits that
some people may draw wrong impressions from his statements, and
acknowledges that Rousseau was perhaps not quite so bad as readers
may gather from his book. This is not enough. Make all allowances
you will to the requirements of clear argument, all the allowances
you wish for some heat in discussing, Professor Babbitt has lacked
fairness to a point not permissible to a scholar. In the first place,
when he refers to the writings of Rousseau, Professor Babbitt does
not make the slightest distinction between statements in which Rous-
seau meant to express his philosophical convictions, and those in
which he regards himself as a man and speaks of his private likings
and personal tastes. For instance, in quoting the Confessions and
the four Lettres a Malesherbes Professor Babbitt is not the conscien-
tious scholar we would expect him to be when he consistently ignores
the fact that Rousseau wrote partly, and even chiefly, to explain
his case in the famous quarrel with the Encyclopedists, and his diffi-
culties in having Emile published. Even suppose Rousseau was the
worst rascal imaginable, and that he and not his enemies had tam-
pered with written documents, it would still be illegitimate to draw
on his character to abuse his doctrine and this is what Babbitt does
all the time when he takes passages in the Confessions in which Rous-
seau explains his life, as illustrating Rousseau the philosopher. Has
Rousseau not a right to say that he is different from others 1 Since
Professor Babbitt grants that Rousseau himself insists that this being
different does not imply superiority (p. 50), why does Professor
Babbitt speak of Rousseau's "gloating sense of his otherwiseness " ?
Can this passionate language to attack a man for his passion ever
inspire confidence to an impartial reader? Moreover does not Rous-
seau rather warn others not to be as he was ; does he not blame the
absurd education which his father gave him and which made him
the romantic dreamer that Professor Babbitt reproaches him for
being? Furthermore, because Rousseau was a dreamer at times,
and wrote he liked revery, Professor Babbitt has no right to infer
that Rousseau advocated a substitution of meditations by dreamery
as a principle of life or even as a principle of philosophy. On
page 375 Professor Babbitt says: ''Rousseau would have us get rid
of analysis in favor of the heart ! ' ' and then he himself speaks of
different meanings of the word heart: why does Professor Babbitt
take the heart of Rousseau as a romantic heart in the sense he, Pro-
fessor Babbitt, imagines it to be, and not as Rousseau himself defines
24 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
it, limits it? Is it true or is it not true that the whole First Dis-
course which brought fame to Rousseau, is directed against the lack
of restraint of his contemporaries (against the "romanticism" of
his contemporaries, according to the definition of Professor Babbitt)
in favor of Roman Virtue? Is it true or is it not true that in the
Nouvelle Heloise Rousseau devotes about two thirds of the book to
condemning the vagaries of a youthful and romantic passion, the pas-
sion of Saint Preux for Julie ? But Professor Babbitt seems to have
seen only the "acre kaiser" (p. 216) ; the only real difference the
writer can see 'between Rousseau and Professor Babbitt in this mat-
ter is that Rousseau is the more puritanic preacher of the two. Again
is it true or is it not true that Emile is all directed against the influ-
ence of the romantic society of the time and toward the development
of perfect self-control of the child 's nature ? Is it true or is it not
true also that the whole of the Contrat Social is an awkward attempt
to guard men from falling a prey to the natural and romantic desire
for absolute individualism? Professor Babbitt has foreseen at least
some objection here to his statements. But listen how he meets the
difficulty ; this passage is quite typical of Professor Babbitt : * ' Rous-
seau transforms conscience itself from ,an inner check into an ex-
pansive emotion [which of course is not true at all] . While thus cor-
rupting conscience in its very essence he does not deny conscience,
on the contrary, he grows positively rhapsodic over cmiscience and
similar words . . . in short Rousseau displays the usual dexterity of
the sophist in juggling with ill-defined terms" (p. 179 the italics
are ours). Now, if we knew not that Professor Babbitt is just abso-
lutely blinded with his preconceived idea of Rousseau we would have
no other word but bad faith to define such a statement. As a matter
of fact Professor Babbitt knows well that Rousseau is not a mere
"juggler" or a "sophist;" otherwise would he not feel it to be below
his dignity to devote so much energy in attacking him ? And indeed,
if one comes right down to facts, I think Rousseau's Calvinism (for
that method of Professor Babbitt 's of ignoring Rousseau the calvin-
ist and recognizing only the romantic traits is untenable) is about as
near Professor Babbitt 's puritanism or classicism as any ethical doc-
trine can be.
If Professor Babbitt had told us : " People who read Rousseau are
more interested in his presentation of the romantic point of view and
ignore his refutation of it," we would say: "Well and good; it is
true ! ' ' But then why not give Rousseau the benefit of the misunder-
standing, and merely say that Rousseau may be responsible for that
misinterpretation because Rousseau did not make his point clear
enough ? But to say that this was Rousseau 's own point of view is
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 25
riot fair. Why does Professor Babbitt not remember that men like
Faguet and like Dide and like Valletta and like Masson lay stress on
that calvinistic side of Rousseau and make him the worst foe of in-
dividualism that ever was. Rousseau did attack, of course, the false
decorum of neo-classicism (just as Professor Babbitt in his Chapter
I.), but to make this mean that he advocated the wild romanticism
described by Professor Babbitt is like saying that because a man is
not an automobile manufacturer, he is selling shoes. To sum up : if
Professor Babbitt is right in saying : ' ' One should not, like Rousseau
and the Romanticists, judge of decorum by what it degenerated
into" (p. 24), we must say just as emphatically: "One should not,
as Professor Babbitt, judge of Rousseauism by what it degener-
ated into."
Professor Babbitt's Attitude towards Romanticism. To get right
to the heart of the matter, we will say that Professor Babbitt has
failed in a remarkable degree to make use of what we call nowadays
historical sense. His definition of Romanticism is given on p. 4: "A
thing is romantic when it is strange, unexpected, intense, superla-
tive, extreme, unique, etc. [This "etc.'' is quite interesting.] A
thing is classical, on the other hand, when it is not unique, but repre-
sentative of a class." The classical being reasonable in Professor
Babbitt's opinion, the romantic may be conceived as either above or
below reason. Professor Babbitt never considers any possibility of
Romanticism being anywhere but below; it is "instinct" (p. 147), 2
and Rousseau and Romanticism are therefore condemnable. Now
first of all, let us not forget that the notion of ' ' reasonable ' ' is sub-
jective ; for, although abstractly speaking it may be impersonal, as a
matter of fact the reasonable never comes to us except as conceived
by some individual; and therefore the "reasonable" of the classics,
or of Aristotle or of Professor Babbitt may be legitimately thought
of as surpassable. This being the case, we are inclined to think that
Professor Babbitt would have been well inspired in following G-oethe 's
saying (recalled by himself on p. 32), "Voltaire is the end of the old
world, Rousseau is the beginning of the new." How unwarranted
for a man, because he does not believe in Romanticism, to quietly say
to one century and a half of human history : * * There is no such thing
as romantic morality" (p. 217). This beats all fanaticism from
Mohammedism to Inquisitionism and Prussianism and Bolshevism.
Even if one disapproves of the new world as it turned out to be, it is
strange policy to try, as Professor Babbitt seems to do, to deny the
very possibility of a new order of things. Says Professor Babbitt :
2 Of course Eousseau used the word instinct in connection e. g. with moral
conscience; but in his time the word had by no means the low materialistic con-
notation which it has to-day and of Which Professor Babbitt takes advantage.
26 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
"Ovid sums up the classic point of view when he says one can not
desire the unknown (ignoti nulla cupido)" (pp. 92~93). With all
the reverence due to Professor Babbitt's authority, this is a very
questionable statement. Why not an ignoti cupido f Did not St.
Paul in Athens testify to some Unknown (rod, and was not St. Paul
justified in announcing a new world with Christ? He was the ro-
mantic of his age, was he not ? Now there can be no doubt that by
the end of the eighteenth century there was started a new great
ignoti cupido, which no decorum, or reason, or common sense could
stop, and Which must be added to the Aristotelian gnotum, and even
to the Christian gnotum as far as this had developed an ignotum
which gradually is taking a more definite form from Rousseau to
modern times. Even Professor Babbitt must admit that it exists
since he attacks it ; and if so would it not be altogether wiser to try
to understand what there may be in it and then guide the move-
ment, rather than to deny its right to existence. It takes more dog-
matism than we care to refute here, to maintain that humanity went
backward owing to the advent of Romanticism. The so-called cult of
the Ego is taken in a most narrow sense by Professor Babbitt ; he is
blind to all that is not disagreeable flavor and vanity in it a flavor
which is very often, but not necessarily, associated with it.
If one does not choose to assume only the critical attitude, one
may say that Romanticism has brought two distinctly good things.
The first is the world reverence for the superior individual egoes of
men like Byron, Chateaubriand, Lamartine, Vigny, Musset, etc. We
would be quite willing to adopt the "classic" consensus gentium to
support the view that posterity was right in admiring these geniuses
for their greatness, and Professor Babbitt wrong in abusing them for
their shortcomings. The second thing which is even far more im-
portant: Romanticism taught us reverence for the impersonal ego,
i. e., the doctrine that, morally speaking, all the egoes ought to have
the same opportunities to show, whenever there is in them something
worth showing. Rousseau and Victor Hugo specially were inspired
by a profound sense of justice when they maintained that the social
order was unduly crushing many excellent people; and Professor
Babbitt is, I fear, terribly wrong when he thinks that Kaiserism was
the product of Romanticism: it looks to most of us as a shocking
anachronism ; Wilhelm Hohenzollern was what we know, not because
of, but in spite of Romanticism and the whole world rose filled with
Rousseauistic and Romantic fury against that revival of ante-revolu-
tionary cynicism. Professor Babbitt pokes fun at Victor Hugo's
exaggeration, and the exaggerations of all the Romanticists who
idealized bandits and the scum of society. But this was simply an
emphatic, dramatic, powerful affirmation of this theory, almost new
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 27
at the time, that men must be judged at their actual value, not from
their appearances, their social rank, or their riches. The whole gal-
lery of V. Hugo's "monstres," with their saving divine souls, the
bandit, the convict, the courtesan, the grand style criminals, down to
the physical monsters like Quasimodo, Bug Jargal, Han d'Islande
as opposed to the corrupt ecclesiastics, the fiendish noblemen, the des-
picable kings were characters necessarily overdone in order to bring
home to the new society the romantic gospel ; just as Prometheus, and
Antigone, and Le Cid were overdone classical characters, in fact
"monsters" in the broad sense which H. Hugo had in mind when he
said that the creation of monsters was a "satisfaction due to the in-
finite." Professor Babbitt may heap Rousseau and Romanticism on
top of The New Laocoon, and Masters of Modern Criticism on top of
Literature and the American Colleges, like Pelion on top of Ossa,
but he will not displace Jean Valjean of the Les Miserables as im-
personating the new gospel of Romanticism and of the world ; and if
one talks of "menace to civilization" by Rousseau and Romanticism,
all depends upon what is meant by civilization. We may not admire
the prostitute or the thief, but we must be willing to admit that old-
fashioned social justice has too often forced some men to steal, that
modern penitentiary systems still exist which prevent regeneration,
while the system of wages has to this day forced many women to the
street. Would it be too severe to say that Professor Babbitt, running
away from Romanticism so as not to hear the plea of the many un-
fortunate ' ' romantics, ' ' reminds one of Romain Rolland taking refuge
in Geneva to tell the French that they were wrong in not extending
their hands to the Germans and that, by resisting them, they pro-
longed the hatred between nations ? All the books of Professor Bab-
bitt will not convince us that the modern world was wrong when it
was willing to favor perhaps a few real bandits, or a few Madam
Bovarys, or a few Joseph Prudhommes (or even the vanity of Cha-
teaubriand or Byron) for the sake of trying to obtain for many who
were crushed by society, the right to live a higher life.
ALBERT SCHINZ.
SMITH COLLEGE.
JOURNALS AND NEW BOOKS
PSYCHOLOGICAL REVIEW. May, 1919. A Schematic Out-
line of the Emotions (pp. 165-196) : JOHN B. WATSON. -Hard and
fast definitions are not possible in the psychology of emotion, but
formulations help to assemble facts. A formulation which will fit
a part of the emotional group of reactions may be stated as follows :
An emotion is an hereditary pattern-reaction involving profound
changes of the bodily mechanism as a whole, but particularly of the
28 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
visceral and glandular systems. A Classification of Reflexes, In-
stincts, and Emotional Phenomena (pp. 197-203) 5 HOWARD C.
WARREN. - Tables have been compiled of human reflexes, human in-
stincts, instinctive tendencies of man, human emotions, human dis-
positions. The tables are offered for comment and criticism and as
a possible working basis for future investigation. Affective Psy-
chology in Ancient Writers after Aristotle (pp. 204-229) : H. N.
GARDINER. - A review of the references to affections in the ancient
writers after Aristotle is given showing many illustrations of it.
The Nature of Mentality (pp. 230-246) : H. N. WIEMAN. - Mental-
ity is the process by which various stimulated tendencies of the or-
ganism are adjusted to the execution of a series of movements
resulting in adaptation to the environment. Where the process of
organization results in a final system which can be fulfilled in exe-
cution, we call the organizing process instrumental mentality.
Where the process continues indefinitely, never developing any
system which can attain final satisfaction and thereby bringing
itself to an end, we call the process creative mentality.
Ritter, William Emerson. The Unity of the Organism, or the Or-
ganismal Conception of Life. 1919. 2 vols. Pp. 329 ; 408. $5.00.
NOTES AND NEWS
DR. J. E. SPINGARN has sent us the following note :
Giovanni Castellano's Introduzione olio Studio delle Opere di
Benedetto Croce: Note Bibiografiche e Critiche (Bari : G. Laterza &
Figli, 1920) will be found of the very highest usefulness as an intro-
duction to the study of Croce 's work. The book is divided into three
distinct parts, of which the first contains a complete bibliography of
Croce 's works and the second a very full list of the critical literature
about him. The third and by far the largest part of the book is
devoted to a discussion of the thirty or forty most important aspects
of Croce 's thought, his conception of philosophy as the method-
ology of thought, his aesthetic theory, the practical basis of error,
the economic moment of thought, the contemporaneity of history, the
unity of the theoretical and the practical, the interpretation of Hegel,
the theory of law, the reform of literary history, etc. In each case
Crpce's point of view is brought out by the citation of some passage
from his critics; and the explanation or rejoinder (we are told by
the author) is virtually given in Croce 's own words. Readers of this
JOURNAL will be especially interested in the numerous citations from
articles which have appeared in these columns, and which are made
clearer in their relations to Croce 's thought by the interpretations
that appear in this very interesting book.
VOL. XVII, No. 2. JANUARY 15, 1920
THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS
HITTER'S ORGANISMAL CONCEPTION OF LIFE
"OETTER'S Unity of the Organism, the first of the three titles
-Lt listed 'below, 1 is a work which calls, I think, for special atten-
tion from students of philosophy. The work embodies, on the one
hand, a notable contribution to the philosophy of the organism,
from the point of view of a fairly extensive acquaintance with the
literature of philosophy; and at the same time an acutely critical
review of the facts and tendencies with attention centered upon the
facts developed in the past generation of biology. The two smaller
volumes throw very interesting side-lights upon Ritter 's philosophy.
They are full of suggestions for the philosopher, but they strike one
as desultory and unfinished. The Unity of the Organism bears the
marks of years of thoughtful preparation. Ritter is everywhere
agreeable reading. His style is frankly and easily personal, free
from all scientific pedantry, and his criticisms, severe and outspoken,
are always good-natured.
The organismal' conception of life i developed by contrast with
the various "elemental" theories so prominent in the biological
thought of twenty years past. Under elemental theories Ritter in-
cludes not only those which regard the organism as a mechanical
'aggregate of elementary units, e. g., as a mosaic of cells, but any
theory which, like the germ-plasm theory, or the chromatin theory
of inheritance, treats one "element" of the organism as more real
or more determining than any other. To all such Ritter opposes
"the unity of the organism," the determination of everything by
"the organism as a whole ;" which is not a name, but a thing, not a
group, but an individual; at least as real and as determining in
itself as any distinguishable ' ' element. ' '
i The Unity of the Organism or the Organismal Conception of Life. WIL-
LIAM EMERSON BITTER, Director of the Seripps Institution for Biological Re-
search of the University of California, La Jolla, California. Boston : Richard G.
Badger. 1919. 2 vols. Pp. xxv + 806.
The Probable Infinity of Nature and Life. Three Essays. WILLIAM EMER-
SON RITTER. Boston: Richard G. Badger. 1918. Pp. 164.
The Higher Usefulness of Science and Other Essays. WILLIAM EMERSON
RITTER. Boston: Richard G. Badger. 1918. Pp. 146.
29
30 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
Thus the unity of the organism comes to mean, even more dis-
tinctly, the uniqueness of the organism, and, in the last analysis, of
the individual organism. Bitter's idea, for which he claims the
support of histology and 'biochemistry, is that every tissue and every
chemical reaction, whatever general features it may have, is also
characteristic, not only of the species in question, but of the in-
dividual. There is no protoplasm, he maintains, but only proto-
plasms. And this means, carried further, that the unity of the organ-
ism is the unity of the living organism. Nothing is more insistently
emphasized throughout the two volumes than the difference a differ-
ence that must be conceived to extend to every detail of composition
and structure between the living and the dead animal. That the
zoologist of to-day, a laboratory zoologist, is mainly a student of dead
animals, is food, not for humor merely, but for thought. The Carte-
sian problem of mind and body seems to be based upon the dead body ;
as commonly conceived, it is a problem of mind and corpse. And bio-
chemistry from which, indeed, Bitter derives his own conception of
the organism as a chemical laboratory and as a chemical element
is also mainly an analysis of dead animals, or at best of the dead
products of the living. "The naturalist accepts not only without
hesitation but with eagerness and gratitude the chemist's report on
what he is able to get out of the organism," but, "knowing as he
does something of the methods by which the chemist gets at the
chemical substances of organisms," he can not suppose that the
chemist's reports "come near setting forth what the organism
actually is."
Bitter speaks here as "the naturalist." This term embodies
comprehensively his personal philosophy and his conception of the
scientific attitude. Speaking always as a scientist, he holds that the
scientific attitude is represented more truly by Darwin than, say,
by Loeb ; by contact with nature in the field than by mere laboratory
analysis; and, incidentally, by breadth of view than by narrow
specialism. Elementalism, issuing in a mechanical and materialistic
theory of life, is the consequence of supposing that the products of
the laboratory are exclusively real. The result is not science, but
" metaphysics. "*' Science in the true sense is based upon a compre-
hensive observation of fact. And therefore the laboratory preju-
2 Bitter supposes that his own method is free from metaphysics. Yet as a
programme for description he postulates the distinction between attributes of
individuation and attributes of relation (The Probable Infinity of Nature and
Life, p. 72), and all of his thinking seems to imply that the world is made up
of things and their relations and not merely of groups of elementary attributes,
OP ' ' phenomena ' ' clearly a metaphysical proposition. To my mind it is about
as possible to eliminate metaphysics from thought as to eliminate respiration
from life.
PSTCHOLOGT AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 31
dice to the contrary nothing is more worthily or more importantly
scientific than the work of description and classification.
One is prepared, then, to learn that, as a Darwinian in science,
Ritter is an Aristotelian in philosophy. He makes the suggestion
very fruitful, I think, for an interpretation of the Aristotelian meta-
physics that Aristotle was primarily a zoologist; and I should say
that Bitter's whole work is, both in the aspects emphasized and in
the difficulties neglected, a characteristic expression of the Aristo-
telian point of view in science. The keynote is a radical empiricism,
recalling in its freedom from logical and scientific convention that of
William James, which will decline, if possible, to treat any aspect of
experience as less real than any other. It is radical empiricism that
he opposes to elementalism. For he is equally opposed to vitalism.
In Ritter 's view Driesch's entelechy (in spite of the derivation from
Aristotle) is no less an abstraction than Weissmann's germ-plasm.
It represents an attempt to explain the phenomena of life by some-
thing less than the organism as a whole.
It is not easy to convey in summary the effect of an argument in-
volving such a mass of detail and so much shrewd suggestion.
Among the elemental theories refuted are : the Weissmann theory of
an independent and all-determining germ-plasm; the theory which
makes the organism merely an aggregate of chemical substances and
processes; the theory of a universal protoplasm; the cell-theory,
which explains the organism as a mosaic of " simple" cells; the
chromatin theory, in which the chromatin of the chromosomes is
treated as the sole "hereditary substance;" the theory that internal
secretions are "formative stuffs;" and the Loeb theory which con-
ceives the nervous system as an aggregate of originally independent,
chemical * ' tropisms. ' ' Ritter is not slow to recognize the advances in
biological knowledge which have been stimulated by these elemental
hypotheses; his point is that none of the elements can be regarded
as the "key" to the organism or in any exclusive sense as a carrier
of heredity. It is the "nothing but" aspect of the elemental theories
which he mainly contests. And the very idea of a " carrier of hered-
ity" he is disposed to condemn as a superstition akin to phlogiston.
Granting that a starfish produces an egg and that the egg gives rise
to another starfish, does any biologist think that only a sufficiently
powerful microscope is needed to enable him to see something in the
egg "carrying" all of the innumerable characters of the adult star-
fish ? What he might expect to see would be certain structural fea-
tures peculiar to the starfish at the egg-stage of the individual's life;
which would then disappear and be supplemented by other features
peculiar to the embryonal stage and so on (I., 224). In brief, re-
32 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
garded as an observed fact, heredity which, by the way, applies
not to adult characters solely but equally to those of every stage is
a process of transformation, not of transmission.
To the Weissmann theory which, on behalf of the continuity of
germ-plasm from generation to generation, seems to call for the
independence of the germ-layers and the origination of sex-cells in
the outer layer, he opposes, among other observations, the appear-
ance of sex-cells in the endoderm of hydroids; and Weissmann 's at-
tempt to account for this by "migration" he characterizes as a
curious ' ' example of the effect on the observing powers of the germ-
plasm type of speculation." To the chemical theory, which makes
the organism a chemical product, he replies by pointing out that each
organism is a chemical laboratory, manufacturing its own specific
product as shown by differences of odor in plants and animals, by
Reichert and Brown's results on hemoglobin, by the precipitin reac-
tion as between bloods of different animals, by the "comparative
chemistry" of the sperm of fishes, of milk, of digestive enzymes,
etc. His extensive and (to the outsider, at least) very instructive
examination of the cell theory is devoted to showing, mainly through
a discussion of observational evidence, that the cell is peculiar to the
organism and always the product of an organism, never a prior and
independent unit; that the unicellular organism is still an organism
(its "simplicity" being an exaggeration on behalf of a supposed
pedagogical convenience), and the egg an organism in the unicellular
stage ; and that the attempt to treat protista as cells results only in
showing, if anything, that beings much smaller and considerably
simpler than cells existed long before cells.
The most extended treatment is accorded to the chromatin
theory; which supplants the cell theory. Adopting Castle's defini-
tion of heredity, which defines heredity simply as "organic resem-
blance based upon descent," Ritter does not deny that "to some ex-
tent resemblance between ancestors and progeny is in some way
connected with chromosomes." Not many of the major theories of
biology are more securely established than the chromosome theory.
His contention, however, is based upon a lengthy examination of
the evidence from protozoans, from the metazoan germ-cells, and
from somatic histogenesis in multicellular organisms that the cyto-
plasm, as well as the nucleus as a whole, is no less responsible ; and
that the inheritance materials of germ-cells are initiators rather than
determiners of heredity.
The same mode of argument is applied to the theory of internal
secretions. For example, as bearing upon the metamorphosis of the
tadpole into the frog, "the truth appears to be that thyroid sub-
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 33
stance is organ-forming in much the same sense that water is organ-
forming for the leaves, flowers, and fruit of the squash vine. . . .
That is, an under-supply of water has an effect upon immature plants
similar to that of an over-supply of thyroid substances upon imma-
ture frogs, namely, that of retarding growth and hastening meta-
morphosis. . . . Thyroid substance is organ-forming only through
being organ-transforming" (II., 145). Again, his point is, with
Sherrington against Loeb, that the simple reflex arc is an abstrac-
tion. "No one should be beguiled into the notion that the readily
observed facts of ontogeny of the nervous system, the various proc-
esses, dendrites, and axones, do actually grow out on nerve cells and
bring cells into connection with one another and with receptor and
effector cells, and that a functional coordination is thus finally
reached [which] does not exist in any way or degree in the early
stages" (II., 169). "Every specific act of every part of the nervous
system is primarily in the interest of some other part and function
of the organism than itself" (II., 184). Even the antagonisms be-
tween reflexes (which, by the way, never lead to the disruption of the
organism) are "constitutive of the normal organism. Even the most
pronounced of them are yet in the interest of the organism as a
whole" (II., 324). In passing from neural to psychical integration
we find him precisely in line with his general position with the
apperceptional as against the associational, or elemental school,
standing for the role of mental activity in the development of
thought.
Bitter's constructive argument, the main lines of which have been
already suggested, consists chiefly of evidence for integration, i. e.,
the influence of the organism as a whole in the production of each
part, distinguished under the heads of growth integration, chemico-
functional, neural, and psychical integration. Very interesting is
the chapter on growth integration, in which he points to the existence
in all growth of graded series of parts or processes (illustrated most
simply in the tapering of a leaf or of the skeleton of a python) and
calls to his aid Child's demonstration of "axial metabolic gradients,"
i. e., gradients in rate of cell division, size of cells, rate of growth,
and rate and sequence of differentiation, which are definitely related
to the axes of the individual or its parts.
But the most striking feature of the organismal theory is the
organismal conception (admittedly hypothetical) of consciousness.
Among the several elemental theories, that with which Bitter seems
chiefly concerned to come to terms is the chemical theory. That
every organic process is a chemical process is treated as indisputable.
But if so, how are we to attribute a real unity, implying individual-
34 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
ity and creativeness, to the organism as a whole? A reply already
given is that the 1 organism is itself a chemical laboratory ; not a prod-
uct, but a source of chemical change. Along the same line, the
organismal theory of consciousness holds that each living organism
has the value, chemically, of an elementary substance. To make the
meaning of this clear, Eitter explains that fundamentally, from its
beginnings in alchemy, chemistry is a study, not of the composition
of things, but of their transformation. Hydrogen unites with oxygen
so as to produce new attributes not prefigured in either element.
Hydrogen is thus creative. And thus also the organism. From the
chemical standpoint, the fundamental aspect of all life, as conceived
by Eitter, is the transformation effected by the organism through
contact with the gases of the air, as typified by respiration. In this
process are created all of those attributes, physical or mental, which
we call "life."
Such a creative transformation, for example, is knowledge.
Ritter quotes the question raised by Hume: how can I infer the
"secret power" of nourishment from the sensible attributes of
bread ? Or, from one instance of nutrition how can I infer another ?
What is the "medium" of inference? Eitter replies that the medium
of inference, and the source of the "secret power," is the individual
organism reacting in an enormous complexity of ways mostly re-
vealed by natural science since Hume with the respiratory sub-
stance it takes in (II., 301). And thus he accords a certain justifi-
cation to the Cartesian theory of innate 1 ideas, in the sense, however,
of hereditary potentialities. This is not to say that knowledge is
merely subjective no more, perhaps, than water is subjective to
hydrogen. Knowledge is a process of transformation involving both
subject and object, both knower and known.
Eitter calls this a conception of ' ' consciousness. ' ' What it under-
takes to make intelligible is the possibility of individuality and cre-
ativeness in something chemically constituted. It seems to me, how-
ever, that the question confronting a theory of consciousness is
rather this: When hydrogen effects, with oxygen, a transformation
into water, we can ask how it looks to the observing chemist ; we can
not (in the view of science and most common sense) ask how it feels
from the point of view of hydrogen. Of any human activity we can
ask both questions. How are we to explain the difference? Eitter 's
reply would be, I think, a refusal to assent to the current separation
of the "inner" and "outer" aspects of life. At least it seems that,
throughout the organic world, an inner aspect exists for every outer.
For "the psychical aspect" is not restricted to the nervous system:
it is everywhere "latent," at least, in "the breath of life," that is,
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 35
wherever there is a chemical reaction of an organism with the gaseous
constituents of the air (II., 303). But the whole organismal concep-
tion seems to imply an essential continuity of organic and inorganic.
All creativeness, Ritter tells us, chemical creativeness with the rest,
is known "through being in our own deepest natures creative" (II.,
295). And he more than once derides the scientist who thinks that
the epithet of "anthropomorphism" is an answer to an argument.
It would seem, then, that the organismal conception points in the di-
rection of panpsychism. At any rate, as against the idea that the
higher stages of evolution contain "nothing but" what was found in
the lower, Ritter holds that the higher are a fresh revelation of the
nature of the lower.
And thus when we ask how the behavior of the organism as an ele-
ment is to be related to the elements found in it by chemical analysis
how the "chemistry" of social and spiritual life is related to the
chemistry of the laboratory the answer is that "the psychic activi-
ties of men, particularly the imagination and the emotions, reveal the
fact that carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and the others, are infinite as to
their attributes of relation, exactly as water reveals a few attributes
of relation of oxygen and hydrogen, and as table salt reveals a few
attributes of relation of sodium and chlorine." At least it is true
"that we have experimental evidence of their possessing a vast
amount and variety of energy, and no ground whatever excepting
the limitations of our momentary laboratory information about the
substances, that the number and measure of their energies is
limited. ' ' 3 If, in other words, the organic phenomena are chemical,
and if also they are really organic and spiritual activities of real
individuals, then it must be that the chemical properties of sub-
stances are only very partially revealed in the chemical laboratory.
Such is the biological outcome of a "naturalistic" point of
view, i. e., of a thoroughgoing empiricism, which accepts as real
whatever is found in observation and refuses to be bound by pre-
determined criteria of reality. Ritter 's book suggests many ques-
tions, of which I will point to only one. Ritter calls himself, very
truly, I think, a "naturalist," but he is no less insistent in claiming
to speak in the name of science. With all his strictures upon current
scientific theories, he writes as one who believes that the only truth
is the truth of science. Now, I find it rather difficult to identify
"the scientific attitude" of to-day with an exclusive regard for the
results of observation. Science, like the church, may be militant or
triumphant. Science militant (more in evidence a generation ago)
is quite pious in pleading only for "the modern spirit of free in-
s The Probable Infinity of Nature and Life, p. 124.
36 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
quiry." Science triumphant stands firmly for the "fundamental"
truths, or laws (such as gravitation and the conservation of energy),
established by the fathers. "Elementalism" is a case of science tri-
umphant; it represents the claim of suzerainty on the part of the
older sciences of physics and chemistry over .the newer science of
biology. Eitter's naturalistic logic is obviously militant. Yet he is
none the less loyal to the law of conservation of energy, as a law es-
tablished, seemingly, once for all.*
This raises the question that I have in mind : how is the organ-
ismal theory of life to be reconciled with the law of conservation of
energy? It strikes me that this is the largest question that the or-
ganismal theory will have to meet, and I wonder therefore that the
question is nowhere broached in The Unity of the Organism. In this
question we have the biological version of the eternal problem of con-
tinuity and change. The organismal theory stands for the reality
of growth and change for " creativeness. " The conservation-law
evidently knows nothing of creativeness. All that it finds in nature
is a redistribution of energies, elements, or what not, on the basis of a
quantitative equality of antecedent and consequent. And positively
it seems to reject creativeness. For any influence at work directing
the redistribution towards an organic end would seem to imply some
additional "energy" at work not subject to the conservation-law;
and, therefore, not to be tolerated. Hitter speaks at times of the or-
ganism as if it were just such an additional agency; for example,
when he is compelled to the ' ' assumption that the organism ' taps ' or
unlocks energy attributes of the elements." 5 This looks very much
like the repudiated Drieschian entelechy. But the question is just
this : how will the unity of the organism dispense with an entelechy,
or something of the sort, and yet avoid being wiped out by the con-
servation of energy ?
WARNER FITE.
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY.
TRUTH, VALUE AND BIOLOGY
I WAS delighted to learn from Professor Wells 's article on "The
Biological Foundations of Belief" 1 that he has "the habit of
regarding all human questions from the biological point of view, ' ' and
so has a fundamental point of agreement with me. For if he is right
in thinking so, we may be able to cooperate further in the discussion
of the important question of the biological control of human beliefs.
* The Probable Infinity of Nature and Life, p. 77.
e The Probable Infinity of Nature and Life, p. 92.
i In this JOURNAL, XVI., p. 259.
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 37
Long experience, however, of the possibilities of intersubjective mis-
understanding among philosophers admonishes me to caution; I
should like first to make sure how far this agreement extends, and
in particular, whether we can agree upon the meaning of the chief
terms involved. For otherwise no profitable discussion is likely
to result.
Unfortunately it is just this point which, in spite of Professor
Wells 's assurances, still appears to me to be in grave doubt. I may
illustrate my difficulty from Professor Wells 's accounts (1) of the
"Pragmatic Fallacy," (2) of the meaning of truth, and (3) of the
relation between logic and psychology.
1. In his first paper 2 Professor Wells gave the name of Pragmatic
Fallacy to what he considered a "confusion of truth and value,"
and appeared to me to illustrate a tendency, still unfortunately
common among philosophers, to regard a pragmatist as an imbecile
who is incapable of understanding the simplest usages of popular
language, and who can therefore be triumphantly confuted by show-
ing that, until he commenced to undermine immemorial usage, every
,one had always 'understood the words to mean' something quite
different from the interpretations pragmatism now sought to put
upon them. Accordingly I had to point out that what he con-
demned was an unconscious 1 fusion or psychic coalescence of truth
and value, which is natural to the human mind, and which the prag-
matists had been the first to expose. It seemed a little hard on them
thereupon' to name this tendency after them, and a little hasty to
condemn it utterly before examining whether there might not be
good ground for it. To this complaint of mine no satisfaction has
been conceded; Professor Wells still calls the tendency in question
"the Pragmatic Fallacy," in spite of having a reasoned pragmatic
repudiation of it before his eyes. Indeed he appears fully to justify
my complaint by explaining that when he defined the Pragmatic
Fallacy as a confusion of truth and value, he was not using ' truth '
in the same sense as the pragmatists. So these unfortunates are not
only required to accept, without investigation or criticism, a defini-
tion which analyzes the 'situation as a 'confusion of truth and value,'
but also to use 'truth' in a way they have declared to be unmeaning,
and finally to ascribe to themselves the absurdities that result from
this procedure ! These are terms which only a complete victor could
dictate.
2. As regards the meaning of 'truth,' Professor Wells 's first
paper gave no inkling of what he meant by it: the second does in-
deed explain it, with admirable clearness, but still in a way sugges-
2 This JOURNAL, XIV., p. 653.
38 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
tive of the unfortunate tendency referred to above. For I can
hardly believe that Professor Wells supposes me to be ignorant that
''common sense and science assert that 'truth is so,' whether or not
it is known by any human mind," 3 that "do popular or common
sense usage 'truth' is thought to mean simply what is so," and that
' ' in both popular and scientific usage the truth is taken to be entirely
independent of what any one may like to believe, or of what any
one may be led to believe for 'subjective' reasons." 4 Nor can I
easily believe that he was ignorant that it is precisely this popular
usage and the false conception of truth on which it rests, which prag-
matism has set itself to challenge, and amend. But, if so, what is
the good of appealing to pre-pragmatic usage in pragmatic con-
troversy? The correctness and value of "established usage" is pre-
cisely the point at issue, and to presuppose a pre-pragmatic sense of
* truth' is merely to beg the question. Pragmatism can only be re-
futed, if it can be shown to disregard a sense of truth it has itself
accepted.
Professor Wells, therefore, should expect to be told that science,
though it starts from common-sense, is progressive, and so is capable
of revising the notions it takes over ; nay that even common-sense is
teachable, though it is slow to learn. So if it can be made clear to
science that the phraseology about 'truth,' which it has very nat-
urally inherited from common speech, is untenable and was based on
ignorance of biological, psychological, and sociological investigations,
which go to show that every 'truth' in every science is necessarily
conditioned by influences deriving from these sciences, every science
worthy of the name will gladly take account of this enlightenment.
Nor is there any reason to suppose that science would scruple to
admit that the depersonalization of truth, which is so convenient for
some purposes, is strictly a methodological fiction, or would demur
to obey the summons of pragmatism and disallow scientific investiga-
tions into the limits of its validity ; the more so that even philosophers
can occasionally be found to analyze and discount their personal
bias ; .as in the noble example recently given in this JOURNAL by Mr.
Bertrand Russell. 5
Common-sense is more inert, but even that is not so pachyderma-
tous as to be utterly insensible of the inconsistencies and contradic-
tions in which it finds itself involved. Among these, of course, the
instability of 'fact' and the constant transformations and trans-
3 L. c., p. 267.
* L. c., p. 268.
5 XVI., pp. 18-20. I should agree of course that "complete escape from
personality" is impossible, but insist also that the " partial " escapes so pertina-
ciously advocated are one and all illusory.
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 39
valuations which the 'facts' undergo in the growth of knowledge,
the impossibility of reaching any 'fact' that can seriously claim to
be absolute or absolutely independent, and of sharply distinguishing
between fact, interpretation, theory, hypothesis, and fiction, would
be found to be relevant, and fatal to the simple-minded dogmatism
of common-sense. At any rate it is perfectly futile to try to refute
pragmatism by taking this dogmatism for granted as unquestionable.
3. Much the same might be said of the absolute distinction be-
tween psychology and logic. When Professor Wells declares that
because "truth is depersonalized in popular and in scientific usage,
truth is a logical and not a psychological matter," 6 "in which only
propositions, theories, hypotheses are involved, while the finding of
these propositions, or the attempt to find them and to verify them, is
a wholly psychological matter, of which truth and falsity may not
properly be predicated, ' ' 7 he must submit to be told that he is com-
mitting the most impossible, monstrous, and mischievous of false
abstractions, against which all pragmatism is an unceasing protest,
and that "a 'logic' which 'emancipates' itself from psychology will
be a 'logic,' which, in repudiating its raison d'etre, sinks to the level
of a mere grammatical exercise," 8 because in abstracting from per-
sonality it "abstracts also from the consideration of judgment as
true-or-f alse. " It may be said further that Professor Wells him-
self confirms this criticism by confessing that his 'logic' is capable
of recognizing only propositions. A proposition, he tells us, ' ' is not
a response. It is, first of all, a group of words, which, as words, are
marks on paper or sounds in the air. Words have a meaning how-
ever ... a proposition, in the first place, is not a psychological sub-
ject-matter; and secondly, it is of propositions that truth and falsity
are properly predicable. " 9
I believe that every one of these contentions is demonstrably
false ; and it is precisely this conception of logic that I have accused
of wanton abstraction from meaning. 10 For meaning is not properly
a matter of words at all, but of persons, and only persons' can value a
belief as true or false. Judgments also are the acts of persons,
whereas Professor Wells 's 'logic' knows nothing of judgments and is
restricted to the propositions, i. e., forms of words, in which their
meaning was conveyed. Professor Wells recognizes of course that
his demarcation of 'logic' departs from common usage at least as
far, I should say, as does the pragmatic sense of 'truth'; but he re-
e L. c., p. 268.
7 L. c., p. 270.
s H. V. Knox's Philosophy of William James, p. 83.
L. c., p. 261.
10 Formal Logic, Ch. XXIV.
40 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
luctantly allows 'usage' to sanction our speaking of "true and false
beliefs or judgments." 11
To me, on the other hand, these are the really important things,
which no 'logic' may sacrifice to juggling with 'propositions/ under
penalty of extinction. Nor can I understand how Professor Wells
can claim to have assimilated the biological point of view, unless he
is willing to believe that "beliefs which a man can not live with
he has no option but to discard; beliefs he can not live without he
must find reasons to adopt. These too are corollaries from Darwin-
ism, which philosophic theories must assimilate, if they themselves
are to live." 12 All this seems to me to hold, not merely of religious
beliefs but of views on logic and metaphysics as well, and the only
way of continuing to profess unworkable beliefs' would seem to be
to hold them with a mental reservation that they must on no account
be acted on.
4. These differences in the meaning we severally attach to the
terms involved will not render it easy for Professor Wells and me
to mean the same thing by the 'biological foundations of beliefs,'
even where we use the same phrases. Still more of an obstacle, how-
ever, would appear to be created by his reticence about my concep-
tion of the relations of truth and value. I had in my article put
forward a very definite proposal for treating 'truth' as a species of
'value,' and shown that every 'fact' and every 'truth' logically im-
plied a claim to be the best of the alternatives that were within the
cognizance of the science recognizing the 'truth' or 'fact' alleged.
Nevertheless Professor Wells has not a word, whether of approval or
of rejection, for this theory. Until he has made up his mind about
it, he hardly seems to me to be in a position to approach the subtle
and infinitely complicated problems which arise when we attempt to
determine, more precisely and concretely, the actual extent of the
biological influence on the beliefs that are in vogue.
For when we approach the actual complexities of human beliefs
we speedily discover how inadequate to their analysis are such
simple-minded maxims as 'facts are facts whether we know them or
not,' or 'truth, like murder, will out,' or 'errors are mutable and
fleeting, while truths are eternal and abide without change.' We
find that in point of fact it is 'truth' that changes and 'errors' that
persist unchanged from age to age, that facts which are unknown
largely cease to operate as such, while illusions, superstitions, errors,
and lies, which are believed to be facts, ipso facto become at least
social facts, and grow a mass of evidence which bears them out, and
11 P. 270, cf. p. 261.
12 H. V. Knox, op. tit., p. 93.
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 41
often seem as authentic as anything that is believed, while the more
we pry into the credentials of our beliefs the more incredible it be-
comes than any 'truth' or any 'fact' should be absolute.
The student of beliefs, therefore, will not arrogate to himself the
right of declaring that any belief has the supreme value ('validity')
of an absolute truth about absolute fact; he will be modestly con-
tent with registering the varying values of beliefs, and will note
their infinite gradations. Neither will he expect sweeping generaliza-
tions, such as that biological conditions must determine the survival
of beliefs and that positive survival-value must entail acceptance as
true and negative survival-value rejection as false, at once to clean
out all the nooks and crannies of his subject.
He will reflect rather that beliefs admit of degrees and shades,
of varieties and variations, and that few minds are so stable, ten-
acious or narrow, as to maintain any particular attitude of belief
with full intensity of conviction for any considerable period, untem-
pered by the corroding breath of doubt, and unmodified by the accre-
tions of age and growing insight. He will find that half-beliefs and
quarter-beliefs are common, and that some beliefs are intermittent
and exhibit seasonal dimorphism, while beliefs that are relative to
an occasion which evokes them are apt to pass away with the same.
He will note further that beliefs may be more or less unconscious,
and that men may be unaware of those that determine their actions,
so that they may unwittingly (as well as consciously) give a false
account of them. Some minds, he will find, are distracted by the
open struggles of incompatible beliefs, all influencing their action
and equally capable of determining it ; while others seem to be built
in logic-tight compartments, and suffer little or no inconvenience
from sheltering inconsistent beliefs in different 'parts of the soul.'
When, in face of such a situation, he is called upon to consider
the relations of belief to action, he will hardly be able to answer off-
hand. He will see that the biological test of survival-value may
become hard to apply, because there are so many ways of more or
less evading and defeating it.
Thus while it may remain undisputed as a general principle that
action is the ultimate test of belief, it will not follow that this prin-
ciple applies to everything that calls itself a belief. The questions
will have to be raised whether what is professed is really believed,
whether it is the professed belief or the real that determines action,
or both in varying propositions, whether, when after a struggle a
professed belief is not enacted, we may safely declare that it was not
'believed.
Again, how are beliefs to be dealt with which disclaim any connec-
42 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
tion with action, and profess to be purely 'theoretic'? It is clear
that they need not lead to the consequences they should logically in-
volve, on the assumption that their meaning and value are to be
tested in the normal way, by action. And this for several reasons.
In the first place action may now be guided by principles, which may
either be depreciated as 'practical makeshifts' or be unavowed alto-
gether, entirely different from those which are called 'theoretically
true.' Hence the most futile or pernicious beliefs can now be held
with impunity. For even though they might be fatal if acted on, yet
since they are not acted on, their holders may persist and flourish;
and their 'beliefs' with them. And yet, if they are not acted on at
all, are they believed at all? Ordinarily, one would answer 'No,
they are mere make believe and camouflage.' But here it is part of
their case that, being purely theoretic, they ought not to be acted on.
If therefore we abstain from pressing the subtler point, that to ab-
stain from action on such a theory is really to act on it, we should ap-
pear to be baffled. Thus the testing of beliefs by action fails in the
case of complete intellectualism. For in this case all connection be-
tween belief and action seems to be broken down altogether. Any be-
lief may accompany any action, and no inference holds from action to
belief or vice versa. This is so inconvenient a corollary that it is for-
tunate that complete intellectualism is extremely rare, and that for
practical purposes it may safely be identified, less charitably, with
complete insincerity. At any rate an adequate diagnostic for the
discrimination of these two habits of mind would appear to be a
great desideratum of intellectualist apologetics.
All these complications may inspire us with caution, and may
receive further illustration, when we approach the difficult question
which has been raised, that of the biological confutation of pessimism.
It is indeed soon clear that the case of pessimism is not to be dis-
posed of by a simple declaration that of course pessimism can not be
true, because it is a belief that eliminates its holders. For how then
could there continue to be pessimists, as there have been in all ages ?
There must be something, then, about the world that enables them
to continue, even as a minute minority. What that something is is
more difficult to determine. It may be that the pessimistic temper
is correlated with other qualities, like caution, that are conducive to
survival. It may be merely that pessimism survives, because it is
not acted on. But it seems to be very unlike the 'purely theoretic'
beliefs instanced above, and probably always affects action more or
less. Complete peissimism is no doubt a difficult theory to act on;
but so is perfect optimism: in fact the difficulties of both would
appear to be essentially the same. But partial, or seasonal, pessi-
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 43
mism does not seem to be practically impossible. It may even be a
better adaptation to the given circumstances than some forms of
optimism. ' Bears,' as well as 'Bulls,' make fortunes on the Stock
Exchange. It may be argued, therefore, that there must be some-
thing inherent in the constitution of things to which pessimism is a
response, or even an adaptation, and that pessimism will be as per-
manent as that something.
But is not this to admit that pessimism is pro tanto 'true,' even
on the vulgar or ' correspondence ' view of truth ? For it is to give it
a basis in the nature of reality. . No doubt as much or more might
be claimed on behalf of optimism, if that too were taken in a partial
or moderate sense. It would then follow that ~botln pessimism and
optimism were 'true' and rooted in reality, which naturally stim-
ulated some mind to a pessimistic, iand others to an optimistic,
reaction.
'Fie upon the contradiction!' intellectualism would thereupon
exclaim. But there would be no contradiction in the nature of the
real. The real would really and objectively be such as to render
either interpretation subjectively possible. It would be, if not neu-
tral, at all events not such as to favor either party decisively. It
would really be such as to stimulate one mind to a pessimistic, and
another to an optimistic, verdict ; nor could any amount of partisan-
ship on our part induce it to alter its attitude. Moreover it would
clearly be as 'objective' a fact as any other that the real appealed
differently to different minds and was valued accordingly.
It may now be suggested that the case of pessimism does not
stand alone. This sort of situation is in fact the rule. In every dis-
puted question the parties to it will have a bias, and their bias will
largely determine their answers. There will therefore be a psycho-
logical, subjective, or personal side to it, and it may often be the only
side that matters. We all know that it is vain to recognize any other
in dealing with the beliefs of lunatics and fanatics. In no disputed
question can it be truthfully alleged that the nature of things im-
poses on us any particular answer. That is precisely why we feel
free to believe as we like, or to let 'theoretic' considerations deter-
mine our beliefs. The real does not determine them for us with bio-
logical necessity. But our freedom in either case has an element
of illusion in it. We are not wholly free, and the 'theoretic' con-
siderations which seem to determine our beliefs are not ultimately
theoretic. For the same reason in both cases, viz., that the nature
of things does exercise a certain control, and limits our freedom,
though it does not destroy it altogether. This is just why it is so im-
portant to show that even in an extreme case, like that of pessimism,
the biological determination of beliefs is not complete.
44 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
All of this, on a little reflection, will probably seem obvious. But
is it not strange that, in face of it, any philosopher should seriously
contend that the human and personal factor in beliefs must be
ignored ? For it appears to be the very factor to which alone we can
look to transmute the ambiguous and indeterminate pressure of the
uncomprehended real into definite judgments of affirmation or de-
nial, according to the bent of the personality engaged ; thus it is the
sole factor which can engender truth and render reality compre-
hensible. It is possible, of course, to abstract from this factor; for
it appears to be irrelevant for many scientific purposes : but never-
theless depersonalization is essentially a fiction. It is a fiction,
moreover, which conceals from our view all the subtlest and most
interesting influences of vital conditions upon beliefs, and renders
impossible any coherent and intelligible accounts of the relations of
truth and value.
F. C. S. SCHILLER.
CORPUS CHRISTI COLLEGE, OXFORD.
THE LOGIC OF PROBABLE PROPOSITIONS
TT^ORMAL logic is an -analysis of principles almost instinctive to
common consciousness. Quite as instinctive are the principles
of probable reasoning; yet philosophers have had little success in
bringing them into the high-light of criticism, and less in uniting
them with formal logic. The present paper is a suggestion toward
attaining this analysis and this union.
A frequent misconception of the nature of probability will serve
as starting point. A judgment is probable, say Laplace and his less
illustrious follower Jevons, because he who judges believes, but is
ignorant of the truth or falsity of his belief. Says Jevons r 1 ' ' Chance
exists not in nature and can not coexist with knowledge ; it is merely
an expression, as Laplace remarked, for our ignorance. . . . Proba-
bility belongs wholly to the mind. ' ' Probability, therefore, being in-
tensity of belief, has the same status as anger or impatience or indig-
nation ; and one may well inquire how there can be any standard of
probability. The only answer is: Since one belief, qua belief, is
stronger than another, the probability of the proposition believed is
greater on account of the feeling of conviction which attaches to the
belief, not at all on account of any character attaching to the propo-
sition believed. But there must be some standard degree of intensity
of belief as point of departure. The essential (and wholly conven-
i Jevons : Principles of Science, Ch. X., pp. 197-98. Also Laplace : Thdorie
Analytique des Probabilities, Introduction, p. ii.
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 45
tional) canon of this school is: Where we are ignorant a belief is as
likely to be true as to be false ; the probabilities of propositions of
whose truth or falsity we know nothing are equal. However, no self-
evidence goes with this canon. Seeing its lack of a priori validity
and not wishing boldly to assume it, some theorists have called it a
generalization from experience. Edgworth says in this connection : 2
"I submit, the 'assumption that any probability constant about which
we know nothing in particular is as likely to have one value as
another, is grounded on the rough but solid experience that such con-
stants do as a matter of fact as often have one value as another."
It is extremely doubtful that, being ignorant of the relative fre-
quencies of events, we have learned from experience, en bloc, that our
expectations are fulfilled about as frequently as not. Any investi-
gation of statistics will yield thousands of cases in which the relative
frequencies of events are not one to two. Had we begun in any of
these eases with the equal distribution of ignorance, experience would
have disappointed us by refuting our assumption. We might, quite
as well, have distributed our ignorance in the ratio one to three, or
one to six ; and experience would, in a great many cases, have corrob-
orated these distributions.
To place probability beyond the merely conventional, we must
disentangle it from belief and attach it, not to beliefs, but to propo-
sitions believed.
Any belief is true, not by virtue of the fact that it is a belief, but
by virtue of some sort of relation between the real world and that
which is believed. When we believe or judge, there is always some-
thing which we believe or judge. Following current usage, we may
call it a proposition. In addition there is always an object of which
the proposition is judged true. This object lies somewhere in the
realm of fact as a " locus of verification." To believe that something
is probable is not to alter this situation. There are still belief, propo-
sition, and fact. It is as absurd to hold that comparative intensities
of 'belief determine the comparative probabilities of propositions as
that irresistible conviction determines truth. Probability, like truth,
gets determined by a relation between the proposition believed prob-
able and the state of the facts. What is this relation?
Clearly, it is not the same relation to fact as that which a true
or a false proposition has. The assertion, "He will probably die of
influenza," is on different level of predication from the assertion,
"He died of influenza." Fact (the time element being inessential)
will ultimately reduce the probable assertion to truth or falsity, with
no middle ground. As a probable proposition, however, it is neither
2 Edgworth : ' ' The Philosophy of Chance, ' ' Mind, Vol. 9, 1884, p. 223.
46 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
true nor false. Its probability conies from its reference to something
other than the fact which will ultimately validate or invalidate it.
Were fact its only referent, it must be either true or false. This
other referent is a class of propositions of which it is a member: a
class of propositions all of which make the same assertion, but which
make this assertion for different instances or different situations.
In the convenient phraseology of Mr. Bertrand BusselTs logic, such
a class of propositions may be denned as all those, and only those,
propositions which result when a prepositional function is given
specific significant determinations of its variable.
It is evident that the members of a class of propositions of this
nature, whether the class be finite or infinite, may be all true, all
fake, or a part may be true and a part false, this truth or falsity
being fixed by a factual "locus of verification" and not by belief.
Therefore, probability is frequency of truth within such a class of
propositions. Fact determines the frequency for the class. And to
qualify a proposition as probable is to ascribe to it a truth frequency
which holds for its class. A probable proposition has as its first
referent its class; as its second and indirect referent, through its
class, fact. 3
It will be well at once to make the distinction between finite and
infinite classes. Obviously, a function could be true for all, for none,
or for part of an infinity of values. Therefore, an infinite class of
propositions would have a truth frequency, and any single proposi-
tion of the class would be probable ; with this reservation, however :
the probability would not be numerical since ratio has no meaning in
infinite collections. On the other hand, in a finite class of proposi-
tions the truth frequency which we call probability may or may not,
as we choose, be represented numerically. It will be the ratio of all
the cases in which the assertion is true to all the cases in which it can
be significantly made. The obvious cases of universal truth, or ' ' cer-
tainty," and universal falsity, or "impossibility" are to be noted in
passing.
The kind of bare, abstract probability attaching to every predi-
cation which can be made separately of a number of instances or
situations is the simple element from which the richer form of prob-
able inference can be constructed. The writer uses because of its
clarity Mr. Eussell's notion of a prepositional function. Bare nu-
merical probability is the proportional frequency with which any
3d. D. Broad: "On the Eelation between Induction and Probability,"
Mind, N. S., Vol. 27, 1918, p. 389 ; views probability as an irreducible reference,
a view to which the present writer can not agree. See also for a similar view, B.
Demos : ' ' A Discussion of Modal Propositions, ' ' Mind, same vol., p. 77.
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 47
prepositional function will be determined as true by all values of its
variable (the values being finite in number).
The measurement of any specific probability is difficult. Not all
facts are given or are 'accessible to observation. So, it is impossible
to know, when a class of propositions has been defined, how many of
them will be true and how many false. Some simple cases are analo-
gous to perfect induction and present no difficulty. Consider the
well-worn example of the urn containing seven white and three black
balls. If the balls be drawn and not replaced, the truth frequency
within the class of propositions **x is the drawing of a white ball"
must be seven to ten. Suppose, however, that the ball be replaced
in the urn after each drawing, so that we have an indefinitely large
number of possible drawings. Now the class of propositions can
never be completely compassed, for it continues to grow larger. How
can the probability of drawing a white ball be measured without
some assumption? Laplace assumes that the drawings are made at
random, random distribution assuring the appearance of one in-
stance as often as any other. This amounts again to the equal distri-
bution of ignorance.
We must escape the assumption of this doubtful canon by taking
the position that probability can properly be measured, not before the
fact, but only after the fact. The measure of the probability of a
prepositional function is a limit which the truth frequency of that
prepositional function as actually determined by trials tends to ap-
proach. The calculation of a probability can not be a priori; it must
always refer back to the fact in experience ; hence it must always be
approximate, tentative, subject to revision. The calculations of ac-
tuaries give the best examples of the proper measurement of proba-
bilities. They are in no sense a priori. Probability being thus meas-
ured after the fact and being defined as a truth frequency within a
class of propositions, it is not necessary that every proposition of the
class be equally possible, or what is the same thing equally prob-
able. It is necessary only that the propositions of the class be dis-
tinct, numerable, and finite. It remains for experience to discover
the limit which its truth frequency ^approaches. However, discov-
ered or undiscovered, there must be a numerical truth frequency
within a finite class of propositions. The subsequent derivation of
the numerical laws of probabilities rests on this statement.
Classes of propositions, obviously, may stand in logical relations
to one another. They may, for example, be related by implication,
disjunction, conjunction, or opposition. Further, the assertion of
such a relation between classes of propositions itself defines a new
class of propositions. This third class of propositions may have a
48 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
truth frequency. Logical relations between prepositional functions
(we have called every propositional function a bare probability) give
rise to the laws of probable reasoning just as they do to the laws of
formal or necessary reasoning. Formal truth or necessity in such
relations differs from probability in that the one holds for all values,
the other only for a part of the values for which the relation can be
asserted. Formal truth or necessity may in this way be regarded as
a special case of probability.
The case of disjunction is fundamental in the logic of probabili-
ties. The law for the addition of probabilities comes from it. Now,
to assert that two classes of propositions stand formally in the dis-
junctive relation means : for any value of the variable, at least one
of the assertions (or propositional functions) which define the two
classes is true. This does not exclude their both being true. Such
a disjunction would be: " Either a young man was willing to serve
his country in the war or he was a traitor to it." This disjunction
will, however, lose its formal character to become probable if there
are values of the variable for which it is false as well as values for
which it is true. It is false when both extremes of it are false, i. e.,
when "a young man unwilling to serve his country is not a traitor to
it." There being such young men, the assertion must be altered to a
probable disjunction.
But how do the probabilities within each of the disjoined classes
affect the probability of the disjunction itself? Since the disjunc-
tion is not exclusive, there may be cases in which both of its extremes
are true, i. e., in which ' ' a young man is willing to serve his country
and at the same time is a traitor to it. " Only fact can determine how
many such cases there are. However, each class of propositions, if it
is finite, must contain a certain number of true propositions and a
certain number of false. Each must have within it a numerical
probability. If the disjunction be exclusive, so that it is true only
when one or the other of its extremes is true exclusively, then the total
number of cases of its truth must be the sum of the number of cases
for which each of its extremes is true. The probability of the exclu-
sive disjunction must, therefore, be expressible in terms of the proba-
bilities within the two classes of propositions which it relates.
A consideration to be mentioned here and borne in mind through-
out the discussion of the relations between classes of propositions is
the identity of the variable. If the class of propositions defined by
"re is A" be related to the class defined by "x is B" through the dis-
junction "x is A or x is B," it must be remembered that though x is
a variable, it is the same variable throughout. The total number of
values of the variable for which an assertion can be made forms one
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 49
term (the denominator) in the probability ratio for this class of
propositions; the number for which the 'assertion is true forms the
other (the numerator). Because x is the same variable throughout,
for all three classes of propositions "x is A," "x is B," and "x is
A or x is B" the denominator of the probability ratio must be
the same.
From this, the identity of the variable, and from the previous
definition of an exclusive disjunction, it follows that the probability
of one proposition being r/x and of another s/x, the probability of
their disjunction, where they are exclusive will be (r + s)/x. This is
the usual rule for adding probabilities.
Similarly, implication between two classes of propositions may
be formal or probable. The probability of an implication, however,
will bear no determinate numerical relation to the separate probabil-
ities of its two terms. But just as strict inference depends upon the
implicative relation, so does probable inference. Inference proceeds
from a true proposition (as hypothesis) and a true implication.
Granted the truth of the implication, "If man is humble he shall
inherit the kingdom of Heaven," and granted that a certain man is
humble, the inference that "he shall inherit the kingdom of Heaven"
is valid. All cases of an inference are numerically represented by all
cases in which the antecedent of the implication upon which it pro-
ceeds is true. (Not so with all cases of the implication; for the im-
plication may be true when the antecedent is false. A false proposi-
tion may imply any proposition.) If the implication be formally
true, the inference will also be formally true; otherwise, unless
formally false, the inference will be probable. Since an inference can
be made only when the antecedent of the implication has a value
making it a true proposition, a probable inference is, therefore, one
of a class of inferences defined as all cases in which the antecedent
of a probable implication is true. Thus, a class of probable infer-
ences is defined by all cases of humility where "humility probably
implies the inheritance of the kingdom of Heaven. ' ' The total num-
ber of cases of the inference (or the denominator of the ratio speci-
fying the truth frequently in the class of inferences) will be all the
cases of the truth of the antecedent ; the numerator will be all cases
of joint truth of antecedent and consequent, that is, all cases in which
the inference is true. This fraction, again, can not be determined by
any combination of the bare probabilities of the terms of the impli-
cation with one another.
The common logical consciousness makes continual and successful
use of probable inference. The notion that probability has meaning
only in so far as one proposition is conditioned by some other propo-
50 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
sition comes, it appears, from conceiving the probable only as that
which is probably inferred, without analyzing this complex notion
into the simpler one of bare probability in reference to a class of
propositions. The foregoing analysis of probable inference is, more-
over, essential to the definition of independence which conditions the
rule for multiplying probabilities.
, The multiplication of probabilities has its basis in the relation of
conjunction. Two classes of propositions being formally conjoined,
their defining assertions will be jointly true for all values of the vari-
able. Being probably conjoined, they will be jointly true only for
some values of the variable. As in the case of probable inference,
their separate bare probabilities give no aid to the calculation of the
probability of their conjunction. For no reason exists why the
product of their separate probabilities should be the probability that
they are jointly true. The number of cases of their joint truth is a
matter wholly determined by fact. Suppose, however, they are inde-
pendent in the sense that when one is true the probability that the
other will be true remains unaffected. For example : It is probable
that a man may be wounded in battle and it is also probable that he
may receive the Croix de Guerre. The probability that he will re-
ceive the Croix de Guerre will remain the same whether or not he is
wounded in battle. Hence, the inference ' * If he is wounded in battle
he will receive the Croix de Guerre ' ' is no more or less probable than
the proposition "He will probably receive the Croix de Guerre."
Their probability is equal. Symbolize the probability of the two orig-
inal propositions by r/x and s/x. The probability that an inference
can be drawn from one to the other must be, as we saw, the ratio of
the number of cases of their joint truth to the total number of cases
in which the antecedent from which the inference is drawn is true.
If k represents the number of cases of their joint truth, then the frac-
tions k/r and k/s will be the probabilities that an inference can be
drawn from either one to the other of the propositions ; for r and s
are the total number of cases, respectively, in which the antecedents
of the two possible inferences are true. (The identity of the variable,
which makes the total number of cases of truth and falsity the same
for both of the classes of propositions and also for their conjunction,
must be again borne in mind. This, the denominator of the probabil-
ity fraction for each class, is symbolized by x ; and since x is assumed
to be in its largest, or ' ' factual, ' ' terms, r and s will be in their largest
terms.) The probability of the joint truth of the two classes of
propositions will necessarily be symbolized by k/x.
The independence spoken of above, which means that the prob-
ability "If a man is wounded in battle he will receive a Croix de
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 51
Guerre" is no greater or no less than ''the probability that he will
receive a Croix de Guerre," can be represented by the equation
r/x = k/s. The probability of the inverse inference of independence
will be s/x = k/r. These two equations, however, are exactly what
result when we assume the ordinary rule for multiplying probabili-
ties. If the product of the probabilities of the two propositions
is equal to the probability of their joint truth, the equation
r/xXs/x=k/x must be true. And this equation reduces to
r/x = k/s or s/x = k/r. Therefore, the arithmetical product of two
probabilities will represent the probability that the two propositions
will be jointly true on condition that the propositions are independ-
ent, m the sense that if one is true the probability that the other
will be true will be unchanged.
It becomes evident from the discussion that, although specific
probabilities like specific truths are to be measured by fact, the laws
of combining probabilities into conjunctions, disjunctions, or infer-
ences lie within the realm of pure logic ; and that the laws of these
fruitful methods of reasoning are intimately related to all other laws
of thought.
RALPH M. EATON.
HARVARD UNIVERSITY.
REVIEWS AND ABSTRACTS OF LITERATURE
Studies in Psychology. Contributed by Colleagues and Former Stu-
dents of Edward Bradford Titchener. L. N. Wilson. 1917. Pp.
337.
This volume of studies was presented to Professor E. B. Titch-
ener at a celebration of the completion of twenty-five years of dis-
tinguished service to Cornell University and to psychology. The
book was edited by Professors W. B. Pillsbury, J. W. Baird, and M.
F. Washburn, and contains contributions from twenty colleagues
and former students. As there are nineteen separate reports, only
the general character of each will be indicated.
W. B. Pillsbury discusses the principles of explanation in Psy-
chology, testing them in the special case of the antecedents of action.
J. M. Baird reports an experiment upon memory for absolute pitch.
He finds it a capacity possessed in varying degrees by different in-
dividuals and present usually only under special conditions. Ferree
and Rand present methods for measuring the ' * Selectiveness of the
Achromatic Response of the Eye to Wave-length and its Change
with Change of Intensity of Light." J. N. Curtis tests the method
of single stimulation, a rapid method of determining tactual dis-
52 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
crimination and susceptibility to visual illusion for use in anthro-
pological and other field studies. She finds that under these special
conditions of work the method is superior to others requiring a num-
ber of tests upon fewer individuals.
Problems in learning and recognition are reported by A. S.
Edwards and H. M. Clarke, and problems in social psychology are
discussed by M. F. Washburn and R. H. Gault. H. C. Stevens re-
ports a modification of the Eossolimo mental tests such that their
good features are retained while the time for the test is reduced
from three hours to one hour. In a study of the affective tone of
color combinations, L. R. Geissler derives the general law "that the
greater the pleasantness of the individual constituents, the greater
will be the pleasantness of the combination." C. G. Shaw discusses
the psychological analysis of the religious consciousness and points
out errors due to the character of consciousness and to the psycho-
logical methods used to study it.
Two studies of meaning are included in the series, one by R. M.
Ogden and the other by H. P. Weld. L. D. Boring and E. G. Boring
investigate the accuracy of time estimations after sleep, the nature
of the designated conscious cues, and the adequacy of these cues to
the temporal judgments. C. A. Ruckmich reports a study of visual
rhythm. He finds in it many of the characteristics of auditory
rhythm, although it is less frequent and more subject to variation
among individuals. K. M. Dallenback presents an analysis of con-
sciousness in a game of blindfold chess. Studies are reported by
E. C. Sanford upon the influence of satisfaction from success and
of intention to learn upon improvement. W. S. Foster contributes
a bibliography of the published writings of Professor Titchener.
The references are grouped under Books, Translations, Articles,
Notes, Discussions (200 titles), and Editorial Work (113 titles).
A. T. POFFENBERGER.
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY.
A Study of the Mental Life of the Child. H. VON HUG-HELLMUTH.
Translated by James J. Putnam and Mabel Stevens. Nervous
and Mental Disease Monograph Series No. 29. Washington, D. C.
1919. Pp. 154.
The monograph under consideration embodies a serious attempt
to interpret the mental processes of the child, through observation
of his behavior. The author, however, labors throughout under two
unfortunate limitations : she begins with a mental set, which predes-
tines all her thinking; and she does not appreciate the difference
between "personal observations/' and observations obtained under
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 53
carefully controlled conditions, according to the method of science.
The mental set which the author brings to her work is that of a
disciple of Freud. She attributes all childish activities to a single
drive the sexual instinct. Swinging, shouting, fear of cats, gen-
eral manipulation of the environment, play, laughing when others
laugh, weeping when others weep, vocalization all are of erotic
origin. Does the child splash about and enjoy his bath? The
excitement is sexual in character. Does the child fight and wrestle
with his comrades? This behavior, too, is sexual, and portends the
sexual act in adult life. Does the child become angry when
thwarted, or resist his elders, or fall into a tantrum of jealousy at
seeing another approved? "What else can it be than" a method of
striving for erotic satisfaction? Intellectual development is also
sexually motivated. ' ' Interest in their own sex organs . . . explains,
too, why boys as a rule acquire a greater familiarity with num-
bers and figures earlier than girls."
The book is full of such expressions as "I maintain that," "it
seems to me," "I can confirm this from my own experience,"
"surely it must be," and the like. Yet there is no hint that the
author regards her contribution merely as an expression of personal
opinion. She generalizes extensively, and apparently is satisfied
that her generalizations have the validity of scientific facts. As
one reads, one's interest is diverted from the subject matter itself,
and becomes absorbed in watching the influence of the point of view,
as it catches every act of the child and forces it to emanate from the
sexual instinct. One is tempted to try the game of showing how
every childish act can be explained by reference to acquisitiveness,
mastery, food-getting, or some other of the fundamental elements in
the original nature of man.
The author's insistence on adequate recognition and study of
the sexual instinct in children is admissible. Of course this instinct
should have its share of the attention of psychological investigators,
which it has, perhaps, not had in the past. One is not led to
believe, however, that all of the attention of such investigators
should be given to it. One believes merely that this author has
failed to make acquaintance with Thorndike, McDougall, and
"William James, and that her reflections would have been illumi-
nated by such acquaintanceship.
LETA S. HOLLINGWORTH.
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY.
54 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
JOURNALS AND NEW BOOKS
THE AMEEICAN JOURNAL OF PSYCHOLOGY. July,
1919. Eye-Movement During Fluctuation of Attention (pp. 241-
252) : H. S. LIDDELL. - Eye-movement does not cause the fluctuations
in attention. No prominent eye-movements synchronize with the
onset of visibility. What is "The Unconscious"? (pp. 253-259) :
HENRY JONES MULFORD. - Consciousness must be considered in terms
of brain structure. "The Unconscious" then is a reflex action of the
neurone and for that reason incorrectly named. The Psychologic
Aspect of Free-Association (pp. 260-273) : THEODORE SCHROEDER.-A
series of free associations are presented. The author analyzes them
into their relation to past experiences of a more or less erotic na-
ture. Psychoanalytic methods are described and defended. The
Freudian Doctrine of Lapses and Its Failings (pp. 274-290) : A. A.
ROBACK. -The lapses in speaking, writing and printing are ex-
plained by far-fetched, fantastic association complexes when in
nearly every instance the mistake can be accounted for by associa-
tions in the immediate context material. On Sound Discrimination
in Dogs (pp. 291-294) : W. T. SHEPHERD. - Some dogs discriminate
differences of musical pitch. Confessions of an Agoraphobic Victim
(pp. 295-299) : VINCENT. -The report of a man who for most of
his life has had a dread of open places and broad level stretches.
All bleak barren landscapes terrorized him. Minor Studies from
the Psychological Laboratory of Vassar College. Directed Ego-
centric Reactions (pp. 300-302) : KATHERINE B. GRAVES, EVELYN
HEATH and M. F. WASHBURN. - Correlation exists between proper
names and pronouns as reaction words and the tendency to person-
ally apply stimulus words when so directed. An Attempt to Test
Moods or Temperaments of Cheerfulness and Depressions by Directed
Recall of Emotionally Toned Experiences (pp. 303-304) : ELEANOR
MORGAN, HELEN K. MULL and M. F. WASHBURN. - Association re-
actions showed a correlation with the moods as shown by the judg-
ment of their friends. The Healy-Fernald Picture Completion Test
of the Perception of the Comic (304-307) : MARIAM A. WALKER and
M. F. WASHBURN. - There is more variation among adults in the
sensing of incongruous humor than among children. The Results of
Certain Standard Mental Tests as Related to the Academic Records
of College Students (pp. 307-310) : HERMINE BAUM, MIRIAM LITCH-
FIELD and M. F. WASHBURN. - There was some correlation in aca-
demic record and test performance for the opposites, analogies and
vocabulary tests. Minor Studies from the Psychological Laboratory
of William Smith and Hobart Colleges. The Comparative Sapidity
of Hydrochloric, Sulphuric and Acetic Acids (pp. 311-313) : L. GIB-
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 55
SON and T. HARTMAN. - Sapidity of hydrochloric and sulphuric acids
depends on their concentration in hydrogen-ions, but acetic acid pre-
sents a stronger taste than this theory will justify. The Daylight
Mazda Lamp in the Psychological Laboratory (pp. 313-315) : GIL-
BERT J. RICH. - The lamp is dependable through the middle range of
the spectrum but is deficient in blue rays. Book Reviews. Charles
Nordman, A Revolution in Biology and Surgery. Dead grafts.
Honorio F. Delgardo, La Psiquiatria Psicologica: PHYLLIS BLANCH-
ARD. Book Notes. Wilfred Lay, The Child's Unconscious Mind. E.
A. Kirkpatrick, Studies in Psychology. A. D. "Watson, The Twentieth
Plane. Charles Mereier, Crime and Criminals. J. B. Miner, Defi-
ciency and Delinquency. R. F. Richardson, The Psychology and
Pedagogy of Anger. Charles 0. Whitman, Orthogenic Evolution of
Pigeons. E. R. Squibb and Sons, Materia Medica. Government,
Thirty-second Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology.
East, Edwin M., and Jones, Donald F. Inbreeding and Outbreed-
ing : their Genetic and Sociological Significance. Monographs on
Experimental Biology Series. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott
Co. 1919. Pp. 285. $2.50.
Morgan, Thomas Hunt. The Physical Basis of Heredity. Mono-
graph on Experimental Biology Series. Philadelphia: J. B.
Lippincott Co. 1919. Pp. 305. $2.50.
Walcott, Gregory Dexter. Tsing Hua Lectures 1 on Ethics. Boston :
Richard G. Badger. 1919. Pp. 193. $1.75.
Warren, Howard C. Human Psychology. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin Co. 1919. Pp. xvii + 459.
NOTES AND NEWS
THE formal opening of the University of Strasbourg under French
auspices took place on November 21 and 22, 1919, the anniversary of
the entrance of French troops into that city after the armistice in
1918. Delegates from all the principal European universities were
present at the ceremonies, as well as representatives from several
American universities, including Harvard, Columbia, Michigan and
Pennsylvania.
A reception for the delegates and 1 guests was held on the evening
of November 21. The formal ceremony of the opening of the uni-
versity took place at 8 :30 the next morning and consisted of several
musical numbers and of addresses by the rector of the university, by
M. Pfister, vice-president of the University Council, M. Bucher,
president of the alumni association of Alsace-Lorraine and honorary
president of the cercle des jeunes etudiants, and by President Poin-
care. At one place during the exercises an opportunity was given
56 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
the delegates to come forward and deliver messages from their various
universities, tout the time was not long enough to permit more than
a fraction to be called upon.
At the close of the programme of inauguration there was a parade
past the university of French troops and members of Alsatian so-
cieties in native costumes, and immediately after this a banquet for
the faculty, delegates and distinguished guests. The formalities were
brought to a close by a gala programme of Massenet's "Manon" in
the evening.
THE American Philosophical Association held its nineteenth an-
nual meeting at Cornell University on December 30 and 31, 1919.
The officers elected by the 'association for the year 1920 are as fol-
lows: President, Professor Ralph Barton Perry, of Harvard; Vice-
president, Professor B. H. Bode, of the University of Illinois; Sec-
retary-Treasurer, Professor A. H. Jones, of Brown.
THE twenty-eighth annual meeting of the American Psycholog-
ical Association was held at Harvard University on December 29,
30 and 31, 1919. Six sessions were held, each dealing with some par-
ticular phase of psychology experimental, educational, social, etc.
and two joint meetings with other associations, the American Asso-
ciation of Clinical Psychologists and the American Anthropological
Association. The officers elected for 1920 are as follows : President,
Professor Shepherd Ivory Franz, of St. Elizabeth's Hospital, Wash-
ington; Secretary-Treasurer, Dr. Edwin G. Boring, of Harvard;
Members of the Council, Professor Herbert S. Langfeld, of Harvard,
and Professor W. V. Bingham, of the Carnegie Institute of Tech-
nology.
A MEETING of the Aristotelian Society was held on December first,
Professor Wildon Carr, vice-president, in the chair. Mr. G. Cator
read a paper on "The Nature of Inference." The logic of the con-
crete universal as the medium of judgment and inference was criti-
cized. It was shown by analysis of examples that it does not really
succeed in making contact with its differences, their content is only
imputed to it. On the other hand the instrument of inference is
always an intermediating representation, particular and not uni-
versal. Absolutism, the outcome of the theory that the active domi-
nant concrete universal is the instrument of inference, ends in the
concept of reality, under the form of eternity, as an exhaustive sys-
tem of differences, without character, a contentless limit. Dr. Ber-
nard Bosanquet, in a communicated criticism, considered that Mr.
Gator's view was right in so far <as it rejected the linear account of
inference an affair of gaps with lesser gaps intercalated. The true
general theory of inference Dr. Bosanquet described as systematic
implication, or creating a partial complex in view of one's world.
VOL. XVII, No. 3. JANUARY 29, 1920
THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS
THE NEED FOR AN EXAMINATION OP CERTAIN
HYPOTHESES IN MENTAL TESTS.
ELATIVE to the time and number of people devoted to work
with mental tests, the results have been astonishingly meager
in theoretical value. Not only do investigators in the field of mental
tests fail to find generalizations of interpretative value in their own
material, but writers who are eagerly searching for data and rela-
tions worth speculating about are given scant reward for any perusal
of the voluminous literature of mental tests. In view of the unpro-
ductiveness of the field in propositions of fundamental significance,
it seems worth while to examine the situation to discover possible
causes that may explain the failure. We must look for such causes
in conditions basic to the field since it is not likely that any super-
ficial errors would bring about what from a theoretical point of view
is great waste of scientific talent.
The fact that mental tests have some practical value does not
account for the lack of contribution to theory, in fact one might
suppose that the increasingly general use of tests in concrete situa-
tions where the result really makes a difference would make the
development of sound theory immediate and necessary. Yet one
finds but little evidence that such stimulus of the theoretical by the
practical is taking place. It seems to me quite contrary to our ex-
perience of the nature of the interaction of pure and applied science
to think that the practical usefulness of tests is limiting their
possibility for theoretical contribution.
I venture this explanation. Extensive collection of data through
mental tests began without the necessary antecedent and contemporan-
eous development of point of view, hammering out of contradictions
in concepts and hypotheses, and elimination of ambiguities in com-
mon everyday words and ideas. There has meanwhile grown up a
habit of thinking about intelligence and ability which is founded,
not upon manifestations of intelligence as we commonly experience
them, but upon derivative facts which are the results of measure-
ment by mental tests. These derivative facts are subject to funda-
mental bias due to the nature of the terms in which the results of
57
58 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
mental test performances have been expressed and due to the type
of analysis which our limited and frequently misused statistical tech-
nique makes possible. A further complication arises through a
willingness to accept statistical hypotheses as applied to intelligence
simply to have statistical technique available for use. Now these
habits of thinking which have been grounded on misleading deriva-
tive facts are the intellectual equipment which has been available in
the analysis of further derivative facts. Naturally, it has been im-
possible to arrive at propositions of theoretical importance, the tool
of criticism being of the same substance and no more finely tempered
than the material to which it has been applied. The piling up of
data has therefore been of little advantage, in fact it has created a
wilderness of tangled issues of trifling importance removing still
further the possibility of theoretical evaluation and interpretation.
In order to justify this position and to clear up if possible the
obscurity of the explanation, let me give some illustrations of the
way derivative facts, the test measurements, may mislead. I am
afraid I shall have to take some definition of intelligence for the
purposes of this paper, but if the reader does not like my definition,
he may substitute any he happens to have a fondness for the
propositions I wish to make will hold good, I believe, for any ordi-
nary conception.
Let us take Stern's definition which is generally known and
widely accepted in its main implications. "Intelligence is a gen-
eral capacity of an individual consciously to adjust his thinking to
new requirements : it is general mental adaptability to new problems
and conditions of life." In spite of the assumptions that are made
in putting the term "general" into the definitions, this concept will
be useful enough here.
If we can, let us abandon the terms and concepts which mental
tests have given us and approach intelligence, this general mental
capacity, as an adaptive function with which we are continuously
in contact in our ordinary experience. One of our thought habits
that we should be likely to question first is that general intelli-
gence, even in quantitative terms, can be expressed as a linear or
one-dimensional function. That is, we should question whether
of two individuals, Henry and Henrietta, one must of necessity be
equal to, greater than, or less than the other in general mental
adaptability. It is interesting to see how this thought habit that
quantitative intelligence must be a linear intelligence may have
arisen. In measuring the performance of an individual in any
test, the scale which we use, be it "seconds" or "correct re-
sponses," is a linear scale; where it is not a linear scale, as when
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 59
time and accuracy are observed, an index is shortly forthcoming
which is linear. These measures, in terms of linear scales, become
symbolic of the individual's performance, and are in this sense
derivative facts introducing the bias of the linear scale into the
comparisons of the abilities of various individuals. When the
results of several tests are combined, as for example, in the Binet
series or the Army Intelligence tests, the standing in the combina-
tion is again expressed in terms of a linear scale, not because we
have analyzed our concept of and experiences with general intelli-
gence and have found it so expressible, but because our common
methods of test measurement and combination preclude any other
result.
I am inclined to think that intelligence may best be thought of
quantitatively as multi-dimensional, a somewhat different thing from
multi-focal; and that general intelligence may be expressed as posi-
tion in multi-dimensional space. I do not wish to enlarge on this
point of view at this time, except to indicate how even though in-
telligence be multi-dimensional, a linear statement might serve with
considerable success for practical purposes as it has done to a very
real extent.
In talking about the size of individuals we are able to distinguish
well enough between large and small men, recognizing that we
consider height and weight in making our judgments. If a man
be tall and heavy, he is large in size ; if he be short and light, he is
small in size. If we should combine quantitative measures of height
and weight for these two individuals just as we combine the meas-
urements on different tests, we should have size expressed on a
linear scale in terms that check up well enough with the facts. If,
however, a man be tall and light, or if he be short and heavy, and
if we should combine these measures, we should find these two men
to be "average" in size, a thing which, if anything, they are not.
Size thus breaks down as a variable that can be measured in linear
terms, because quantitatively size is at least two dimensional, and
"general size" must be stated as position in two-dimensional space.
The reason we can talk about men being large and men being
small, is because of a correlation that exists between height and
weight. But we do not deceive ourselves by thinking that size is
an objective attribute measurable in linear terms; we never refer
to a tall thin man as a man of average size. We have, however,
grown into the habit of thinking that general intelligence is ex-
pressible linearly, and in my opinion this is due, let me repeat, to
the influence of derivative facts in shaping our concepts. General
intelligence might better be thought of as position in multi-dimen-
60 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
sional space, just as size is considered position in two-dimensional
space.
Let us consider a bias of another type. If we were approaching
the field without too definite statistical prejudices, I am inclined to
think that we should question before we got very far the implica-
tions of the assumption of linear regressions between test perform-
ance and general intelligence. The assumption is made quite gen-
erally and it has affected basically our thinking about the measure-
ment of ability.
It should be stated at this point that evidence of linearity con-
sisting of the regression of test measurements on judged intelli-
gence is ordinarily worthless. The range of ability tested is usually
so narrow, or the method of obtaining judgments so prejudices the
facts as quantitative measurements that the regressions observed are
descriptions of actual conditions at second or third hand at best.
Consider any test you please, it is fairly obvious that for certain
ranges, either extremely high or extremely low, differences in in-
telligence will not be paralleled by differences in test performance.
Where we have a fairly objective criterion as age in maturity rela-
tions or trade skill in trade test relations, we find gross departures
from linearity the rule rather than the exception.
Yet the habit of thinking of these relations in terms of correlation
coefficients with the implied assumption of linearity is quite general.
It is of course basic to all attempts to combine tests by the partial
correlation method, a method that was found quite inapplicable in
the preparation of trade tests where the regressions could be studied.
Consequently, we are building on the sand as long as the con-
sequences of such an assumption are not critically examined.
One other illustration should serve, though I have no idea that
the possibility of such illustrations is exhausted. We should prob-
ably not admit that we, as individuals, are of the same general
intelligence from time to time if we were very hard pressed on the
point. We know pretty definitely that our ''general mental adapta-
bility to new problems" varies markedly from time to time and
place to place. It varies with what we have eaten and how we have
slept, with time of day and character of our immediate associates.
For some people this variability is probably greater than for others.
But an assumption of a static intelligence level is necessary
to mental test work as it is now conceived. It may work well enough
for practical purposes, but it is no basis for speculation. Such an
assumption seems based on a certain degree of uniformity as found
in testing the same individuals at different times. So much the
worse for the tests! If we did not need such an assumption so
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 61
badly, we should question at once whether tests giving the same
rating from time to time are not extremely insensitive measures of
general mental adaptability. This bias is strengthened by the
necessity for making such an assumption in order to use the methods
of attenuation which have been popular. For although one can
make allowances in studying the size of correlation coefficients for
errors that are made in measuring a static thing, to make such
corrections, when the thing measured is unstable and variable is
hardly permissible.
In my opinion, the fruitlessness of the mental test field is caused
by the persistence of such thought habits as the three I have de-
scribed. I would not contend that the propositions I have made
are true. I only want to show that many fundamental notions that
color the whole test field are open to superficial criticism to say the
least. The justification found in Stern, that just as electricity is
measured without too precise a knowledge of electricity, intelli-
gence can also be measured without a final theoretical groundwork,
has carried us too far. We must examine our basic hypotheses,
putting aside as far as possible such concepts as we have formed as
a result of the study of derivative facts. We must abandon in
research that we hope will be of theoretical importance, assumptions
and methods which critical analysis shows to be faulty, painful as
this procedure may be. It is not my intention to question the very
real practical value of mental tests. But the usefulness of mental
tests in concrete situations can not increase beyond a certain point
unless, along with the activity in the field as an applied science,
results of a speculative and interpretative value are secured. It is
probable that many of the failures of mental tests can be traced to
our present inadequate theoretical foundations.
BEARDSLEY RUML.
THE SCOTT COMPANY LABORATORY.
PROFESSOR STRONG'S THEORY OF "ESSENCE"
XAM in agreement with so many things in the epistemological
part of Professor Strong's recent volume, that I hesitate to
put myself in the position of a critic. I should prefer to have it
understood that I am raising certain questions of interpretation
rather, with the design, not so much of establishing a rival point of
view, as of clearing up ambiguities in the interests of a mammon
platform. I do not feel clear to what extent, if any, Professor
Strong really would disagree with the claims I shall here advance.
But I do feel that there are points on which his own pronounce-
62 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
ments are not as unequivocal as could be desired; and two of these
in particular I should like in what follows to examine.
Professor Strong's theory of knowledge, condensed into a very
brief formula, is roughly this : that in knowledge we are, through the
instrumentality of a psychical state, affirming the presence, in an
object independent of the knowing experience, of an abstract logical
essence, this objective essence alone, and neither the object nor the
essence's own "givenness" being given, or immediately apprehended.
And the first question I want to raise concerns the precise descrip-
tion of this ''given essence."
My difficulty centers about the apparently wavering use in Pro-
fessor Strong's exposition of two or three of his fundamental terms,
and, first, of the term "object." At the start he defines explicitly
the object as the independent real to which knowledge is directed ; T
and to this usage it seems to me important to keep. For if the
essence also is an object, we appear, notwithstanding all we may
say about its non-existence and its non-psychical character, in-
evitably tending to think of it as a shadowy image hovering before
the mind, and taking the place therefore of the real thing as the
primary knowledge reference. Confessedly, that is, we should have
two objects on our hands, and so the problem of adjusting them
a problem which, as Professor Strong holds, constitutes the stum-
bling block to traditional forms of dualism. Nevertheless we find
him continually himself adopting just this terminology. Thus he
speaks of "the enormous variations of size which are observed in
visual objects (i. e., essences) ;" of the essence as the object without
its existence; of the "object as an essence" being given in sense
perception; of the possibility of an object 'being given which does
not exist. 2
In comparing such passages with the more explicit definition, I
seem to myself to detect a mixture of two points of view which I
can not see are identical, though Professor Strong apparently would
think them so. The two are set alongside one another instructively
in a passage in which he speaks of the essence as "a mere logical
abstraction, a vision conjured up." 3 Now I am unable to feel the
appropriateness of speaking of a logical abstraction as a vision con-
jured up. Logic has to do with, conceptual reality, with characters
rather than with things; 4 vision, on the contrary, suggests just the
sort of concrete picture or replica which, since it need have no exist-
ence in the physical world, philosophers have found a home for in
i ' ' The Origin of Consciousness, ' ' p. 35.
2 Pp. 231, 175, 36, 41.
s P. 125.
* For a statement of the logical interpretation, cf. 176.
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 63
the realm of the mental. And in spite therefore of Professor
Strong's repudiation of his own earlier distinction 'between phe-
nomenal things which alone we directly perceive, and real things, or
things in themselves, 5 he not infrequently reads very much as if the
essence-object were just such a phenomenal thing. Nor is his con-
stant assertion of the non-existence of the essence necessarily incon-
sistent with this. I have been unable to make quite certain also
what is meant by this non-existence, for it might have either of two
meanings, corresponding to the distinction just noted. If the
essence is strictly logical, then its non-existence supposedly stands
for the fact that it is a character or group of characters merely,
taken as such in abstraction from existence; it is non-existent be-
cause its existence status is not attended to in apprehending it, and
so is not a part of the apprehended content. But the non-existence
of the essence might also mean, simply, that it is not the actually
existent object itself ; there need, indeed, be no physical reality any-
where of which it is a "ghost or vision." This last however would
fail to carry any implication that it is not, as a vision, something in
itself. A ghost must apparently have some reality, or it would not
"be" at all; and in spite of ourselves therefore we are pointed back
to the psychical. And it is this second interpretation indeed that is
the apparent sense of Professor Strong's most explicit account of the
matter. The essence, he says, has the same unreality that belongs
to shadows; the material fact called a shadow is a piece of dark
ground, but as a shadow it is the unreal counterpart of a thing. 6
But is the "unreal counterpart of a thing" any more than a piece
of dark ground that simulates a thing, though it lacks other qual-
ities necessary to make it the particular sort of thing it simulates?
Surely it is unnatural to speak of a logical fact as a shadow, or as
the "unreal counterpart of a thing." And Professor Strong is
every now and then betrayed into language that implies some non-
physical "existence" for the essence. He speaks of the case where
something appears which is not real (i. e., which is not the reality
it appears to be!), and of the datum as the effect of a real object. 7
lie speaks of the essence given and the object of which it purports
to be the essence as mutually independent, 8 though two things have
already been defined as "independent" when one can exist without
the other. 9 It would perhaps be possible to avoid express contra-
diction by explaining that what is meant is not strictly the essence,
5 P. 7.
P. 180.
7 Pp. 77, 73.
a P. 62.
P. 42.
64 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
but the mental state that carries the essence ; but at best the very
tendency to slur over the distinction between the two after they
have been so carefully separated a tendency which is illustrated
rather frequently in Professor Strong's pages 10 is evidence that
there is real difficulty is grasping the essence, considered as a vision,
apart from a psychical embodiment. The same situation, verbally
at least, is suggested by the account of the process through which
the essence becomes more than an essence, and is affirmed of the
existing object. When we are told that in sense perception we not
only have an essence but assume it to exist, the wording seems to
imply that what we do is to add existence to something already fully
qualified as an object. But if it already is an object, it is not
altogether easy to meet the claim that it is itself the original object
of knowledge, in which case dualism has come back.
In other places I think I am able to interpret Professor Strong
in a way to free him from anything except verbal contradiction,
more particularly in certain passages which might seem explicitly
to be denying the view here maintained where he argues at length
that the "true data of sense perception are not qualities but quali-
fied objects/' 11 But here, if I do not misapprehend him, he is
not thinking about the essence at all. When he maintains that
physical things, not "sensibles," are the true data of experience, or
that what is given in sense perception is the physical object, 12 he is
apparently, in spite of his definition of "given" and of "datum,"
not referring to the essence to which these terms alone apply but
to the real object itself. He is intending to maintain, that is, not
that the physical object is originally given, but that it is known or
perceived, as the fact to which the "whole state of mind and body
is adjusted 13 is not a mere logical construct from sensibles, as Mr.
Russell would hold. But this involves not only essence, but affirma-
tion; it is knowing, and not consciousness. 14
Now a way out of these ambiguities seems to me to be available ;
it is to stick to the insight that the essence, or that which is given,
10 cf. p. 70.
" P. 105.
12 P. 48.
is P. 46.
**This is not the only place in which Professor Strong fails to live up
strictly to his own definition of ' 'given." Thus twice within the three pages
that immediately precede the formal list of definitions in which an object is
defined as a real thing existing in one continuous time and space, and the essence
as alone that which can be given, he has confused givenness with knowledge, and
spoken of objects as given. ("The fact being that what is originally given or
known is objects." "It will show us how these mental facts are involved even
in the cognition of physical facts, when yet nothing is given or experienced except
the latter.")
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 65
is not an abject or picture or vision at all, but a logical schema pure
and simple, a complex of abstract characters. The essence in knowl-
edge is that which we ascribe to an object which is not as such ex-
perienced ; and what we thus ascribe is no more a non-existent vision
that it is a mental state. It is a "nature." It is necessary, in other
words, to separate sharply the objectivity of an essence from its
own given character, the former being a new fact which supervenes
upon it. The essence as such is objective in the sense (1) that it is
not subjective or mental (but rather logical), and (2) that it is in
knowledge used to characterize an objective world; but it is not in
itself individualized as an object. You can not, Professor Strong
argues, see the existence of an object; you can only see the object
and assume that it exists. 15 But what is the difference between this
and his own discarded phenomenalism ? To be sure you can not see
the existence of an object; but neither can you see the essence, as
Professor Strong here seems to assert. You do literally see the ob-
ject. But that implies that the only thing you see is the existing
object, and not that you have an object first and then add existence
to it. Knowledge, in other words, of which seeing is an instance,
involves both apprehension of something (essence) and affirmation,
and until you have the two together you do not get anything
describable as an object; so that to call the essence alone an object
is misleading. If we recognize this we can always mean by the ob-
ject the independent real, as Professor Strong's definition requires.
And thus only, as I see it, do we get rid of a vicious ' ' representation-
alism" in the sense in which Professor Strong defines the term. If
by vision we mean the ghost of an object, then it is something seen,
and we do not know directly; if on the other hand vision means
only the seeing, then it is not itself the essence, but that which first
must use the essence before we get any object at all.
And this appears to me not only to render a true account of the
experienced fact, ibut to be the only way to meet satisfactorily the
issues which neo-realism in particular has raised. In perception we
do, it is clear, somehow seem to be in the direct presence of the
object itself. And it seems plausible to interpret this as meaning
that the real object is directly apprehended, or present bodily in
experience; otherwise, we may be asked, are we not forced to say
that what we call the object is only a subjective appearance, and so
find ourselves in the toils of subjectivism? Now I gather that what
is in Professor Strong's mind is this same sense of an actually ex-
perienced object which by opening our eyes we can see before us;
only as on his showing this can not be the real object (since, for one
thing, it may be present when no real object exists) , it is translated
15 p. 48.
66 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
into the essence-object. As I have already said, however, it appears
to me that if we are to free the term appearance from any taint of
a subjective existence, and be able to hold that we are, as we seem
to be, in the immediate cognitive presence of the real object, it can
only be by refusing to talk of any object at all as given, or imme-
diately apprehended, even an object without existence. And Pro-
fessor Strong has already shown the way. There are two separate
aspects of the naive sense of actual contact with the physical world,
which need to be carefully distinguished. There is, first, the vivid-
ness which attaches to those qualities that perceptually qualify the
object, and which, as Professor Strong has pointed out, does not
need at all to conflict with the insight that the essence is itself ab-
stract. A vividly apprehended quality is still a quality, and not a
thing. But now this vividness does not itself constitute objectivity,
as is shown by the fact that what is felt as non-objective a pain for
example may 'be realized with equal or greater vividness. The
sense of the presence of a "real object which has the quality" must
be explained differently. And I think it is possible to do this, and
to give a plausible account of the immediate feeling that the real
thing is there, without supposing that its being there means that it
is directly experienced, in the sense in which the being there of the
quality is just its vivid presence in experience, or its direct appre-
hension. The object is there in the sense that we feel ourselves
directly in a practical or motor relationship to it. The experience
of the object's presence reduces, in so far as I can analyze it, to
this tingling sense of active tension, of actual or potential adjust-
ment, through which I realize myself as conditioned by, or depend-
ent on, something which stands in active causal relationship to my
body. The presence of the object is the presence of that which I
instinctively recognize as able to affect my welfare as an organism ;
this ability to insure practical consequences is what I mean by a
real thing; and the recognition is brought home to me by the tend-
ency to muscular response which characterizes of necessity my deal-
ings with my physical environment. Apart from this there would
be no "things" in my experience, but only a variously toned field of
sensuous feeling. And if objectivity is thus bound up with an
experience that goes beyond immediate apprehension and reveals a
world independently acting upon us, then whenever the thing-aspect
of experience is involved we have, not essence and consciousness, but
real existence and cognition.
As all our knowing starts from sense perception, it is not strange
that in thought and. memory and imagination, also, there should be
reproduced, along with the group of characters, this same sense of
objectivity in terms of which alone it is possible for our thinking to
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 67
deal with the real world. For it is surely so, as the neo-realists have
done good service in reiterating, that we do not in thinking cognize
images, but things; even when I think an imaginary object like a
centaur, I am thinking a centaur, and not the image of a centaur.
In thinking, it is true, I may image an object ; but this very state-
ment, if taken strictly, excludes alike the claim that the object is an
image, and the claim that the essence is an object. The image is
the medium through which I think the independent object.
This experience I then can introspect, indeed, and recognize as in-
volving some sort of substitute for the object, and not the actual
presence, as an experience, of the object itself. But what I thus
recognize is still not the essence: since the introspective act brings
before the mind not the characters present in the perceptual experi-
ence simply, but likewise its objective reference as an affirmation or
activity, this always possesses an ''object" aspect which make it con-
crete and not abstract. 16 For surely to image a horse is different
from thinking the concept or essence horse ; I can do this last only
by attending to the abstract features which describe a horse, and to
this process any picture of the horse as an object is irrelevant. And
this is the only basis on which I am able to see the possibility of
escape from the perplexities of neo-realism. If we separate the two
meanings of presence attaching to the two aspects of real existence
and of content, we can accept the claim that the content is appre-
hended, without having to suppose that the existent (or non-exist-
ent) object itself is there; its presence is, in thought, only the re-
production of the sense of "being in the presence of" which we get
from the motor experience in sense perception, though with that
vivid feeling of compulsion lacking which there normally assures
belief.
It is partly into terms of this same ambiguity that another point
of difficulty which I feel with Professor Strong's formulation of his
doctrine seems to resolve itself namely, his account of the status,
as distinct from the nature, of the essence in knowledge. He has
himself isolated the problem as the problem of how a sensation or
mental image can convey an essence. 17 To this question, however, he
i So long as I talk of an "image," it is always the image of something, and
I can not get away from "objectivity." Consequently the pure fact of psy-
chological analysis on the existential side is not an image concretely as this im-
plies a "thing," but a group of sensations or reproduced sensations, among
which the motor sensations involved in the recognition of objectivity take their
place. There may be a certain grouping or cohesion among these, though even
this measure of unity seems to be due to the unifying activity of the organism
and its needs. But the mere coalescing of sensations does not yet constitute an
"object," apart from the further reference to an active center of force be-
yond me.
IT Pp. 111-2.
68 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
seems to me inclined to give two different answers; or rather he
gives one answer, ; but every now and then suggests an alternative
one. The explicit answer is : the essence is given through the func-
tion by which the sensation guides the organism in its adjustment to
objects. 18 Thus a horse has the essence "a fearful object" if the
visual sensation causes him to shy ; and the cat is ipso facto aware,
when a certain sensation in her mind evokes instinctive movements
of crouching and watching. 19 That all we need for our analysis is
the sensations called forth by the object, and the reaction or atti-
tude to which they prompt, 20 is asserted more than once without
qualification.
Now I can not at all feel, in the first place, that the reduction of
cognition to a sensation plus a physical act is successful in meeting
the full needs of the situation. We may indeed act upon the sug-
gestion of a sensation; but the act is purely and simply physical,
and as such lies outside the circle of the inner life of experience
where knowing resides. It seems to me a plain matter of fact that
we are aware through introspection of a situation quite distinguish-
able from this, to which we assign more naturally the name of
knowledge; we are aware, that is, over and above the de facto
physical response, of something describable as a conscious recog-
nition that an object, felt to have a real and independent life of its
own, is characterized by an immediately apprehended content.
And of this persuasion Professor Strong's formulated theory gives
no account at all. He does indeed provide a certain ''experienced"
element in the form of a "return wave" from the act of attention
or adjustment, which gives a special coloring to the cognitive
state; 21 but this at best explains only our sense of activity in
knowing, and not at all the special features of cognition of its
content side. And Professor Strong is himself constantly using
language that goes beyond his own analysis. He speaks of "con-
juring up" the essence, of its being "brought before the mind,"
of the symbolic use of the psychic state which "gives rise to a vision-
of-the-object, " of essences as "loopholes through which we truly
contemplate" reality. 22 Surely such words as these imply more
than a mere sequent fact of action. Or why speak of the given
essence as "rendering the object truly," 23 if all we mean is that the
sensation (which is not the essence) produces an appropriate act?
The explanation seems to me to be that Professor Strong has in
is Cf. p. 103.
i Pp. 122, 137.
20 P. 279.
21 P. 137.
22 Pp. 43, 87, 170, 235.
23 p. 232.
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 69
mind two separate problems, which he does not sufficiently distin-
guish; and his more explicit doctrine has reference only to one of
these, and that, for epistemology, the less fundamental one. It
appears, namely, that when he talks of cognition, he intends by the
term, when he is speaking strictly, only the perceptual experience to
begin with, 24 and even this in a particular and narrow sense the
practical or 'biological sense, rather than the epistemological or con-
templative one. In other words, cognition means to him that in-
stinctive relationship in which we stand, in perception, to the phys-
ical world in terms of adjustment to the environment a "func-
tion existing primarily for the sake of action."' 23 This is the fun-
damental evolutionary meaning of perception. The animal, or
primitive man, has no concern with the question whether the char-
acters given in perception possess true ontological significance;
what he is interested in solely is its practical service as a stim-
ulus to response, in terms of a successful carrying out of the
functions of life. And so far cognition falls within the lines of
Professor Strong's theory. It is enough if the sensation serve as a
mark or symbol for the guidance of action; and the truth of the
cognitive process is sufficiently covered by the success of the act to
which it leads. But it is necessary to note very clearly that the
utility of sense experience for guiding action, and its adequacy for
giving us a true account of the nature of things, or for serving as a
" loophole through which we truly contemplate reality," are things
quite distinguishable.
And now what I wish particularly to point out is that Pro-
fessor Strong is a<ble to justify his own answer to the question, How
is the essence conveyed by a sensation ? only 'by failing again to live
up to his definition of the given. "Cognition, in fine," he writes,
* ' is extremely simple ; it is nothing but the givenness of an essence,
and the acting in consequence as if an object existed." 26 The
essence, it appears from this (and indeed from his definitions gen-
erally), must 'be given ibefore the act can follow. But before the act
there is nothing discoverable except the sensation, to whose nature
the essence may be, Professor Strong holds, entirely foreign. It is
to be remembered once more that Professor Strong professes to dis-
tinguish givenness, or consciousness, from cognition, and that only
the latter brings the physical object itself into the situation; and
he expressly contrasts his awn theory with that of James as a theory
of consciousness versus cognition. 27 But if givenness is a function
24 Cf. especially p. 228.
25 p. 7.
=6 p. 40.
27 P. 130.
70 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
of the sensation in leading to an act, what is left as a description of
what he intends by cognition? Is not in fact this act just the
affirmation which Professor Strong adds to givenness in order to
explain knowledge, and which he has defined as the ' ' implication of
acting as if the object existed"? 28 In other words, it looks to me
very much as if, contrary to his main thesis, no real distinction is
left between givenness and cognition, if we are to explain givenness
by a functional act. We might indeed make givenness only the
potentiality, as against the actuality, of knowing; but I do not see
that this is a significant distinction. And we should at any rate
still leave unanswered the problem which Professor Strong professes
to be solving How does the sensation convey the essence? Even
granting that knowledge is sufficiently described as organic adjust-
ment, the meaning of this question would still be, What particular
feature in the psychic state makes possible the act of adjustment?
and this is not answered by reasserting the fact. And still less, if
knowledge possesses a genuine cognitive as distinct from a behavior-
istic value, is the givenness of the essence accounted for by any-
thing short of an explanation of how a psychic state can give rise
to the recognition, prior to action, of a definite cognitive content
assumed to be a description of the object a situation quite ignored
when to a sensation we simply add an act.
Now Professor Strong seems to me to have the true answer to
this question within his grasp, without however making any use of
it in his explicit theory. In most cases, he writes, "we are justified
in assuming that where an essence is given an object exists, and that
it has the character given in the essence." 29 Now this last phrase
supposedly means, not that the sensation leads to successful action
merely, but that the essence, as an essence, possesses a certain char-
acter which we believe attaches to reality. The claim of attachment
to reality is what we have already called affirmation, and involves
an act; but what constitutes the character given, or essence? The
solution suggested more than once by Professor Strong himself is:
identity of character between the sensation and the object, in so
far as this is needed to justify cognitive claims. 30 Of course it may
28 P. HI ; C f. p. 48. 2 P. 38.
so < < In so far as a visual or tactile sensation, bearing in its own nature the
impress of the object, causes the organism to react as if it were in the presence
of that object, in so far the object is given as an essence" (122). "In the case
of vision this sense organ is so constructed as to make the sensation a sort of
duplicate or picture of the object" (129). "Something corresponding to [the
qualities] must be assumed in the psychic state, in order to account for the aware-
ness being of the qualities" (140). "With the development of sense organs ob-
jects become able to evoke within the organism impressions corresponding to if
not actually resembling themselves" (172). Truth means "agreement with the
portion of the environment pictured sufficient at least for the attainment of prac-
tical ends" (181).
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 71
still be said that mere identity here is not givenness. Nothing is
given except as this given essence is also cognitively used; given-
ness is an aspect always of the larger knowledge situation. But as
an aspect, the capacity for "conjuring up" a definite thought
content, immediately apprehended, belongs not to affirmation or act,
but to the psychic state in its own right, and the characters it is
able to bring upon the scene. The difference which Professor
Strong makes between knowing in perception an object, and know-
ing in thought a past experience (in which latter case he allows
that the vehicle must be a mere copy or duplicate) , 31 is thus not, as
he tends to make it, a difference in kind. True "contemplative"
knowledge always involves such a copy (or identity of character) ;
and sense perception differs from thought only in the degree in
which critical reflection may throw doubt upon the full adequacy
of its profession to convey, on its qualitative side, a correct descrip-
tion of the real world. Meanwhile for the other and psychological
question, which is interested solely in the mechanism through which
a sensation or image may serve as an effective cue to conduct, the
whole essence concept is irrelevant; sensation plus instinct is all
that we need.
A. K. ROGERS.
YALE UNIVERSITY.
TESTS OF TRUTH
THE ancient faith that somewhere, in some form, there is such a
thing as a universal criterion, a kind of philosopher's stone,
the bare touch of which is sufficient to distinguish the pure gold of
truth from all baser metals, is still with us, and in many disguises
is strongly entrenched in modern logic and epistemology. The
dictum de omni et nullo that famous principle of syllogistic reason-
ing still serves to separate the valid from the fallacious. The
Principle of Identity and the Law of Contradiction are still invoked
in the same cause, and we still have in our midst a band of true
believers in the might of Direct Intuition, Coherence, Correspond-
ence, and the Inconceivability of the Opposite. In short, wherever
we have a theory of knowledge, we tend to have, among the char-
acteristics by which it is defined or made determinate, certain attri-
butes which come to be regarded by the faithful as infallible criteria
of truth.
The object of the present paper is not to enter upon a detailed
discussion of the manifold forms in which this absolutistic faith still
wins its proselytes, but rather to examine the general idea which
31 p. 113.
72 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
gives to such a faith, its meaning, to find out what can be said in its
favor, to see how far, if at all, it can be of use in the discovery
and organization of empirical truths, and to see where and if
possible how and why it breaks down in practise.
I
With this aim, we shall begin by considering an instance of the
actual pursuit of truth in the concrete, in the field of natural science.
We have before us a dish containing a fluid which is either an acid
or an alkali. We have also red and blue litmus paper. Can we, by
any manipulation of universal criteria, discover whether the fluid is
acid or alkali or are we not rather compelled to apply the specific
tests of experiment and observation? In seeking truth within the
sphere of sensory experience, our methods of discovery, and the con-
crete tests which we actually employ, appear to be empirical, and to
vary according to the concrete problems with which we are faced.
There does not appear to be any place, in the attempt to discover
concrete answers to concrete questions, for the application of any
universal test. No doubt it is true that we are in some sense pre-
supposing the laws of identity and contradiction, the principle of
coherence, and the rest. But these principles are too general, and
too remote from the concrete problem, to afford us much assistance
when it comes to detailed investigation. The laws of identity and
contradiction, for instance, inform us that the solution of the prob-
lem is what it is, and is not what it is not. The principle of
coherence tells us that our solution will cohere with the vast body of
ascertained truth in a single system. The principle of correspond-
ence tells us that our conclusion, if true, will correspond to the facts,
etc. But no one, and no combination, of such principles will ever
inform us whether the fluid before us actually is or is not acid. In
fact, these principles plainly refer rather to the organization of ele-
ments of knowledge which we have obtained elsewhere from sense-
experience. They do not seem able to increase the bounds of knowl-
edge, but only to organize it.
They are not, however, to be regarded as entirely useless, even
in the discovery of concrete answers to concrete questions. In
organizing elements of knowledge obtained from sense-perception,
we may, perhaps, by adopting new viewpoints and effecting novel
combinations, arrive at answers which are concrete and yet are in-
dependent of further sense-experience. Every member of the con-
gregation is desirous of discovering the age of the new minister. In
the course of a sermon he happens to mention that he took part in
the Spanish- American war, and in some special reference happens
to state that he was only eighteen at the time. By putting together
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 73
these two items of information and comparing them with the present
date, every member of the congregation at once deduces his present
age, and the concrete problem has received a concrete solution. Has
not this result, it might be asked, been effected by applying the
general principle of coherence ?
Let us consider. The actual discovery is made by subtracting
1898 from 1919, and then adding the answer (21) to 18, which gives
us 39 as his present age. That is to say, the answer is discovered
by subtraction and addition operations somewhat more specific than
* ' coherence. ' ' And not only so, ibut by subtracting 1898 from 1919,
and by adding the answer to 18 i. e., by very specific addition and
subtraction. If we were acquainted with the general principle of
coherence, but did not know how to add and subtract, the problem
could not be solved. And even if we were acquainted with the
general types of mathematical operation, unless we also knew that
we were to subtract specific numbers, and add specific numbers, the
concrete question would continue to remain without a concrete
solution. It looks, then, as though, even when we restrict ourselves
to the organization of knowledge, the principles which we actually
use are specific, and contain elements which are empirical, and vary
from one concrete problem to another.
So far, then, as the discovery of concrete truths is concerned,
these general criteria are of little or no assistance. But, it may foe
urged, their proper use is other than this. Given some discovery,
derived, it may be, from sensory experience, these principles may
be applied to test the discovery, to find out whether it is valid or
not, whether it corresponds to fact, whether it is consistent with
the whole 'body of ascertained truth, etc. Their proper use is thus,
not originative, but critical. They do not tell us exactly what is
true, but they do help to discover what must be rejected as false,
i. e., as inconsistent, or not corresponding to fact, etc. Dialectic,
then, or the science of these rules, is the scientia scientiarum, the uni-
versal science which sits in judgment upon the concrete "laws"
proposed for general acceptance within the departmental sciences,
and decides upon their consistency or inconsistency, their corre-
spondence or non-correspondence to fact.
Good. The office of the dialectician, then, resembles the office of
the book-reviewer. It requires omniscience. The reviewer must
know what the facts are, before he can judge whether the suggested
formula states them correctly or incorrectly. So too with the
dialectician. He must know more than the departmental scientist.
On the one hand, he must have a tprofounder viewpoint and a wider
logic, and on the other, in order to apply his general touchstone to
the concrete problems, he must know more than the special scientist
74 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
within his special field. He must know what the special facts are,
which the scientist does not know, but is seeking to formulate. This
knowledge is a sine qua non, whatever the criterion selected. It is
as true of tl coherence" as of ''correspondence." To know that a
given proposition is coherent with the whole .body of ascertained
truth, it is necessary to know, not only the given proposition, but
also the whole body of ascertained truth i. e., to have at least the
special knowledge of the scientist. But in order to sit in judgment
upon his work and decide whether it is consistent with some higher
viewpoint, it is necessary to have still further knowledge; and to
decide absolutely without appeal whether it is consistent or incon-
sistent, true or false, it is necessary to have knowledge of the ideal
system of completely consistent knowledge i. e., to have omniscience.
In order, then, to apply these criteria as universal tests of any
and every concrete formulation of fact which sets up for a truth, we
must have omniscience. This is, in itself, a fatal objection to the use
of these general formula? as tests. For, if we were not in possession
of the truth, we could not apply these tests in any given case ; and
if, on the other hand, we were already in possession of the truth, in
that case we should not require the roundabout and empirical method
of trial and error which the departmental scientists use. At best,
the use of such standards would be secondary, in order to inform
others ex cathedra by how much their approximations to truth fell
short of the complete knowledge which was in our own possession ;
and if certain members of the human race were actually in possession
of this complete knowledge, they would publish what they knew, and
the empirical methods of the scientist would fall into desuetude.
Again, as in discovering truth, so in testing it, it would not be
the general criterion which would be applied, but always something
more specific. To test the correctness of the proposition, This
liquid is acid,, we do not ask, "Does it correspond with the facts
is it coherent is the opposite inconceivable?" We take a piece of
blue litmus paper, dip it in, and see whether it turns red or not.
The test used is concrete and specific. So too, when told that the
minister's age must be 39, because he took part in the Spanish-
American war at the age of 18, we test the truth of this statement
by going through the appropriate numerical calculations. In actual
practise, then, the general or universal criteria do not seem to-
be used.
There exists a further argument, of a more abstract and dia-
lectical character, which proves, not only that the principles of
coherence, contradiction, etc., are useless in testing truths, but that
no universal criterion whatever could 'be of the slightest use. The
argument is as follows : Let x be any universal criterion of truth
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 75
i. e., the law to which any and every statement which is to be
recognized as true must conform. Let A be any proposition what-
ever, the truth of which is to be tested. Then, if A conforms to
x, A is, toy definition, "true. " But a further question may be
raised: How do we know that our application of a? to A is itself
correct? We must apply the test, and thus reach the conclusion,
"The proposition A conforms to x itself conforms to x." But about
this test of the application of the test to A, the same question can
again be asked, and we are thus led, and led inevitably, to the
infinite regress.
What are we to conclude from this? To make a judgment, we
reflect upon sensory experience. To test that judgment, we reflect
upon that reflection. To test that further reflection, we reflect
further, etc. We must .conclude that the "further" reflections carry
us no further. What we really da is to reconsider the evidence, to
go over the ground again, and repeat the experiment. If our repeti-
tion leads us to a different conclusion, we believe that we simply did
not think the first time. If, however, on going over the evidence, we
come to the same conclusion, we regard that conclusion as, so far, es-
taiblished. The test of truth, then, which is actually applied in prac-
tise, seems to consist in repeating the specific experiment, or in hav-
ing others repeat it, so as to confirm our results and not in applying
any general or universal test such as coherence, correspondence, etc.
Finally, however, we must note that there is no virtue in repeti-
tion as such. If we can not be certain of a proposition the first time
we make a judgment, will one, two, three, four, n repetitions give us
the required certainty? The idea is, on the face of it, preposterous.
Repetition is clearly an external device, a caution to ensure that we
really think, really reflect upon the concrete situation with which we
start, omit nothing, neglect no circumstance that is relevant. As a
rule, it is the imperative, Be thorough! It bids us, when we reflect
upon our concrete problem, really to reflect, and not to leap to con-
clusions. Such an imperative, however, is no test of truth. For a
test, in order to be used as a test, must be different from what is
tested e. g., as blue litmus paper is different from acid. But in this
case, the "test" actually employed by the scientist is not different
from the original experience in all its concreteness. They fall to-
gether. The concrete "test" of a concrete scientific proposition,
then, is nothing more or less than all the evidence upon which the
proposition rests. This will plainly differ from one problem, to
another, and will be empirical, concrete, and particular. Expressed
in terms of the symbolism suggested above, either x is different from
A as a universal test differs from a particular proposition in which
76 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
case we fall into the infinite regress, and can never apply our test to
the particular proposition; or x and A coincide in which case we
are left with particular truths, each with its own concrete experience
as its guarantee, but without any universal criterion. Our conclusion
thus is, that to apply any universal criterion to any concrete propo-
sition requires omniscience, and that short of omniscience it can not
be done. We fall into the infinite regress in the attempt; for
"Truth" is infinitely distant. There is a gap between absolute
Truth, on the one hand, with its universal and necessary criteria
a priori, and on the other hand the concrete truths, with which human
experience, and the specific sciences gradually built up on the basis
of that experience, are concerned. Each specific science has its own
specific tests the concrete evidence upon which its (empirical) laws
are based. But from a human point of view we have only the de-
partmental sciences, the specific problems, each with its specific evi-
dence. There is, from this viewpoint, no scientia scientiarum, no uni-
versal science of dialectic applying its a priori tests of Truth to the
loose and uncertain approximations of empirical science.
II
In the above, what is our position ? We have drawn a sharp dis-
tinction between the absolute and the empirical, between dialectic and
science, and have argued that the gap between these can not be
bridged by any amount of human speculation which starts from the
more metaphysical side. It looks as though we have duly noted the
existence of a state of war between science and the forces of tran-
scendentalism, and have definitely associated ourselves with the forces
upon the side of science. What, it might well be asked, is our position
but that of the Pragmatist, throwing yet another stone at the now
discredited bugaboo, absolute idealism ?
This impression, natural as it might seem, is too hasty. We have
pointed out that, in spite of the distinction between our more meta-
physical and our more empirical thinking, there are, in the camp of
the idealists, many weaker brethren, whose faithfulness i. e., uncriti-
cal acceptance of illegitimate consequences of the idealistic position
leads them to attach to certain attributes of knowledge in the ideal-
istic theory a value which these attributes do not possess. Our con-
clusion is that such attributes can not be used as universal tests of
concrete truths. The gap remains, and can not be bridged as the
faithful, but uncritical, brethren believe. This reasoning is directed
only against the uncritical idealist, the tender-minded brother who
seeks in absolutism a refuge from the storm and stress of empirical
problems, and from the viewpoint of a romantic idealism of the imag-
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 77
ination condemns the unromantic but very necessary work of the
practical scientist.
Not all idealists, however, are thus to be lumped together as
" tender-minded" refugees from the world of work-a-day wrestling
with the obstinate problems of concrete life and science. There is an
idealism of the will as well as an idealism of the imagination. There
is a critical, as well as an uncritical idealism. It is perhaps only fair
that we should set forth, in brief outline, the theory which remains
untouched by our criticisms.
For the theory of critical idealism, there exists a gap between em-
pirical truths on the one hand, and metaphysical Truth on the other,
and it is considered hopeless to attempt to bridge this gap from the
more metaphysical side. It remains, however, to attempt to bridge
the gulf from the more empirical side, acquiring ever more and more
scientific observations, and organizing these more and more, so that
in time our empirical knowledge will gradually approach more nearly
the ideal of knowledge organized into a single perfect system. The
use of the concept of a more perfect knowledge is not as an absolute
test for the discrediting of empirical formulations in favor of some
mystical contemplation, but as a practical vision which shall defi-
nitely encourage and guide our steps. It is a stimulus to renewed
effort, and consists in a consciousness of the development of science
into better science. There is nothing about it which can be regarded
as "absolute." It arises from reflection upon the progress of science
in the past. This leads to an ideal continuation of the curve of scien-
tific progress into the not-too-distant future, and thus gives us a
standard which is not static, fixed, and absolute, but develops with
the advance of scientific knowledge, beckoning us always further
forward, towards a better, finer, truer, more scientific knowledge.
The uncritical idealistic viewpoint gives us a static Superlative in-
finite, absolute, unimprovable Truth utterly removed from human
concerns, and so far above human aims that it remains an object for
ecstatic contemplation only, divorced from action. The critical view-
point gives us no Superlative, but a Comparative, firmly based upon
human experience in the past, and pointing towards its gradual real-
ization in every step forward which knowledge takes in the present
and not-too-remote future. For the critical idealist, the ideal of
truth is a not-too-remote vision which guides and stimulates us in its
quest a quest continuous with present scientific advance. The tests
of concrete truths remain empirical, scientific, and human pointing,
however, always a little beyond what has actually been attained.
As to an absolute or universal criterion of Truth, however, from this
standpoint there is no such thing. R UPERT CLENDON LODGE.
UNIVERSITY OP MINNESOTA.
78 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
REVIEWS AND ABSTRACTS OF LITERATURE
A Survey of Symbolic Logic. C. I. LEWIS. Berkeley: University
of California Press. 1918. Pp. iv -f 406.
This work, which appeared among the Semi-centennial Publica-
tions of the University of California, fills an important hiatus in the
literature of logistics and mathematical logic. These studies are of
so recent an origin that there has been till now no opportunity to
consolidate into a single treatise anything but their most simple and
primitive aspects. Accordingly the student, after leaving the almost
childishly simple Boolean algebra as presented in the writings of
Couturat and del Re, is immediately confronted with that for-
bidding monument of patience and research, the Principia Mathe-
matica of Whitehead and Russell. He encounters an unfamiliar
symbolism, new methods, and a most exacting standard of rigor. It
is only after he has become proficient in this new field that he can
discern the fundamental unity underlying the investigations of
Boole, De Morgan, Peirce, and Schroder, on the one hand, and those
of Frege, Whitehead, and Russell, on the other.
Professor Lewis has written a work that completely bridges over the
gap between the old and the new. He treats the history of symbolic
logic in an impartial and comprehensive way, slighting neither the
founders of the classical theory nor the principal innovators of the
present day. After a good resume of the classical theory of equa-
tions and inequations, he proceeds to a parallel development of the
foundations of the logic of propositions, propositional functions,
and classes on the Boole-Peirce-Schroder basis and on that of the
Principia, exhibiting both the formal identity of the two systems
and the inadequacy of Peirce 's enumerative method of defining uni-
versal and particular propositions in terms respectively of iterated
logical multiplication and iterated logical addition. There is a
mass of excellent detail work in this connection, so that this part of
the book should prove useful as a glossary for those who desire to
transfer statements from the Peirce symbolism to that of Russell
and vice versa.
Chapter V is devoted to Professor Lewis's personal contribu-
tion to the subject the calculus of strict implication. This valu-
able piece of work is here for the first time gathered together in a
unified and definitive presentation. It unquestionably constitutes
a legitimate alternative to the " material implication" of the earlier
writers, but the reviewer does not consider that it has been definitely
established that "strict implication" is not simply formal implica-
tion between propositional functions whose variability is suppressed.
The last chapter concerns the relations between logistic and
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 79
mathematics. The Russellian view is fairly expounded, but the
author also develops a "heterodox" standpoint, from which both
logistie and mathematics become a manipulation of symbols by a
method of substitution whose laws can never be stated exhaustively
in a symbolic form. This constitutes a perfectly just criticism of
the part played by non-symbolic postulates in the Principia. Lewis
is quite right in pointing out that the postulates of the Principia
differ from other postulates in degree rather than in kind.
Among other things, Lewis contrasts the encyclopedic logistic of
Peano, the deductive logistic of Russell, and the synthetic logistic
of Royce, in which many types of order are obtained by the specifica-
tion of a more general, inclusive order. A notion not introduced by
Lewis, but worthy of comment in this connection, is that of cate-
gorieity with reference to a particular set of concepts, introduced
into mathematics by R. L. Moore. Moore has pointed out that a
non-eategorical set of postulates may still completely determine the
formal properties of some notion that may be obtained from the
undefined terms. A set of very few postulates even a set of no
postulates at all may thus determine a number of completely speci-
fied notions, if used in conjunction with the appropriate definitions.
It is hence possible to build up a theory of order that is, a logistic
based primarily or even exclusively on definitions instead of on
postulates. This, I imagine, is more or less what the Royce logistic
proposes, and what Mr. Lewis considers a promising alternative to
more developed methods.
NORBERT WIENER.
MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY.
The Field of Philosophy. JOSEPH ALEXANDER LEIGHTON. Second
revised and enlarged edition. Columbus: R. G. Adams and
Company. 1919. Pp. 475.
To write a satisfactory Introduction to Philosophy is no mean
task. Those who have tried it will, I am sure, agree with me in
this statement. Especially is it difficult in this period of the renewal
of philosophy, when there is such an apparent diversity of opinion,
when philosophy is like a vine full of sap sending tendrils in every
direction.
There are two ways of approach to the study of philosophy, the
historical and the analytic. I do not mean to assert that one of
these ways must exclude the other, but only that one of them must
dominate. Professor Leighton realizes that "the History of Phi-
losophy should be a second course." Yet he is also aware that "a
purely topical and systematic introduction fails to bring the student
in contact with the great historical doctrines in other than the scrap-
80 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
piest fashion." Hence his own method is an attempt to combine the
two ways of approach. The only difference of opinion of any value
can, I believe, concern the blending of these two elements. Is there
enough unity? Are typical philosophical problems brought out
clearly before the attention of the student?
The Field of Philosophy falls into two parts: The Chief Prob-
lems and Standpoints of Greek and Medieval Philosophy, and The
Chief Problems and Standpoints of Modern Philosophy. When one
examines the chapter-headings, one soon sees that practically all the
topics which have arisen in the history of philosophy are touched
upon. The book is systematic and, for an introductory text, de-
cidedly exhaustive. The references at the end of each chapter will
enable the enterprising student to supplement the summaries given
in the text. There is thus a plenitude of material. My only fear
would be that some of the students would be overwhelmed by the
detail of the treatment. Since Professor Leighton has worked out
his text in the class-room, I suppose that my fear is groundless.
The historical side of The Field of Philosophy is admirably done.
I do not think that any one who used this text would find many
points of interpretation to differ upon. I have, for instance, found
his treatment of Primitive Thought in Chapter II. especially well
worth while. Assuredly, more of our students should know what
the primitive view of the world was and how much of this natural,
early outlook still lingers with us.
I presume that it is in the systematic part of an Introduction
that the particular view of the writer is bound to come to the front.
How far should an Introduction be a presentation of various stand-
points? To what degree should it stress one beyond others? This
is the crux of the problems. Professor Leighton evidently tries to
be fair to all points of view, but and I think very rightly indi-
cates his own outlook, a modified form of objective idealism.
In his epistemology, he champions what he calls Critical Realism.
Of course, a term in philosophy seldom has a fixed meaning. Yet I
have so completely identified my own outlook with this term that I
was interested in discovering what Professor Leighton meant by it.
"It may be objected to this view that what we mean by a real thing
is the thing as it exists independently of our perceptions. To this I
reply, yes and no ! Independent of my perceiving it, yes ! But no
meaning can be attached to the idea of an object existing inde-
pendently of anybody's perceiving it" (p. 356). To me, at least,
this is nearer idealism than realism. Yet we have in Leigh ton's
book, as in those of Pringle-Pattison and Mackenzie and others of
the idealistic tradition, a swing toward realism and a desire to get
away from any taint of Berkeleian subjectivism.
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 81
The mind-body problem is to the average student quite strategic
in its importance. I have found the author's presentation of his
own view interesting. So far as I can grasp it, I find it analogous
to Leibniz's solution. There are three grades of individua: (a) In-
organic or Physical Individua; (6) Vital Individua or Monads; and
(c) Mental Individua or Selves. I am not clear in my mind whether
he thinks of these three grades as levels of evolution or flat differ-
ences in kind.
The last few chapters are devoted to an exposition of the various
philosophical disciplines. The chapter on The Philosophy of His-
tory is very good. So are the treatments of Psychology, Logic and
Social Philosophy. There is, perhaps, a little more exhortation in
the discussion of Philosophy of Religion than suits the naturalist's
taste. The appendix contains a study of contemporary movements
in philosophy. In this he shows scholarship and acuteness.
There will, I think, be general agreement that Professor Leigh-
ton has produced a high-grade piece of work. If it is just a trifle
ponderous at times, it makes up for this by completeness and scholar-
ship. He is quite evidently a genuine philosopher who has thought
things out for himself.
KOY WOOD SELLARS.
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN.
JOURNALS AND NEW BOOKS
REVUE PHILOSOPHIQUE. March-April, 1919. La psychol-
ogic, ses divers objets et ses methodes (pp. 177-221) : A. LAI/ANDE.
-A historical sketch, followed by a resume of positions on the sub-
ject of the province, objects, and methods of psychology. Esthe-
tique et memoire. Du role de la memoire dans la perception du Beau
realise par I' Art (pp. 222-250): E. D'EiCHTHAL.-The role of
memory is "the establishment in time or space of a solidarity of
elements which contribute, by their connections, to the impression
of a whole that satisfies completely our sense of perception. From
this establishment grows the feeling of a result which constitutes
esthetic realization . . . whatever may be its limits and particular
forms, the enjoyment of the beautiful does not exist without the
preliminary work of memory, which reunites and solidifies the ele-
ments while organizing them into an image of a whole endowed with
a certain persistence, first on the part of the creative artist, and
then on the part of auditor on spectator. ' ' La dynamique cerebral
(pp. 251-269): GEORGES BoHN.-An exposition of Bonn's law of
reciprocal phenomena: "When an action produces on a body in
82 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
equilibrium a modification of condition, this is accompanied, under
very general conditions, by a secondary phenomenon, called the
reciprocal phenomenon, which reacts on the initial action ; the nature
of the reciprocal phenomenon is always such that it tends to oppose
itself to the continuation of the modification produced." The lavr
is applied to cerebral phenomena. L'X objectif conscient (pp. 270-
318) : PAUL, DUPONT. - " By means of objective psychology we ap-
prehend that the given, the phenomenon, appearance, is an event in
an element of material objectivity, and as objective, is a function of
events in other parts of the objective. Whatever the phenomenon,
it is for the subject as a fact of conscience, the contrary of a phe-
nomenon, since the latter does not appear to him who observes the
concomitant phenomenon in the brain of the subject. The spiritual-
ists think that in man at least the objective x decomposes into two
x's, distinct, and independent." ... No argument of scientific value
can settle this problem that breaks out as a result. ''The fact of
consciousness is the establishment in and by certain objective 'x's of
a particular kind of certain of their variations, functions of the
other f x.' The objective of which we are conscious is then in the
class of the first '#'s. It is certain that each of them comprises, as
an essential constitutive element, the objective x, which has for its
phenomenal manifestation the organized body or one of its parts,
the brain. It is not possible to affirm scientifically that there is
not in man another constitutive element, destitute of phenomenal
manifestation, but nothing that we have so far seen indicates its
existence." Notes et Documents. Notes sur la memoire: LUCIEN
ARREAT. Analyses et Comptes rendus. Jose Ingenieros, Proposi-
ciones relatives al Porvenir de la FUosofia: J. PERES. Giuseppe
Saitta, II Pensiero di Vincenzo Gioberti: J. P&RES. Frederick J.
Teggart, The Processes of History: LUCIEN ARREAT. Revue de*
Periodiques.
Briffault, Robert. The Making of Humanity. London: George
Allen & Unwin. New York: Macmillan Co. 1919. Pp. 371.
Macintosh, Douglas Clyde. Theology as an Empirical Science.
New York: Macmillan Co. 1919. Pp. xvi-f 270. $2.
Partridge, G. E. The Psychology of Nations: A Contribution to
the Philosophy of History. New York: Macmillan Co. 1919.
Pp. x + 333. $2.50.
NOTES AND NEWS
The National Research Council has sent us the following news
item:
"DR. W. V. BINGHAM, Head of the Division of Applied Psychol-
ogy of the Carnegie Institute of Technology at Pittsburgh, has been
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 83
appointed Chairman of the Division of Anthropology and Psychol-
ogy of the National Research Council. Dr. Bingham is an authority
on methods for measuring the intelligence of normal adults. Early
in the war, as Secretary of the Committee on Classification of Per-
sonnel of the Army, Dr. Bingham applied these methods to testing
the mental capacity and fitness of recruits as a basis for assignment
and training for particular military duties, and later continued this
work as Lieutenant-Colonel in the Personnel Branch of the General
Staff.
"At present Dr. Bingham is connected with several bureaus of
the Carnegie Institute, which are engaged in studying the applica-
tion of these principles in commercial and industrial occupations.
One of these bureaus, that of Personnel Research, is supported by
annual contributions from 30 corporations. This bureau is engaged
in ascertaining the best methods for selecting and developing execu-
tives, salesmen, and clerks. Another bureau is applying the same
principles in developing methods for selecting and thoroughly train-
ing workers in about 900 positions in seven of the leading depart-
ment stores of Pittsburgh. These stores contribute $32,000 annually
for these investigations. The financial support given this work of
investigating and applying scientific mental tests reveals the confi-
dence which is being placed by corporations and store executives in
the money value of a rational study of their employment problems. ' '
The other members of the Division of Anthropology and Psy-
chology, besides Dr. Bingham, are as follows :
Representatives of Societies
AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION
FRANZ BOAS, Professor of Anthropology, Columbia University, New
York City.
ROLAND B. DIXON, Professor of Anthropology, Harvard University,
Cambridge, Massachusetts.
J. WALTER FEWKES, Ethnologist, Bureau of American Ethnology,
Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D. C.
A. L. KROEBER, Curator of Anthropology, Museum of Anthropology ;
Professor of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley,
California.
BEBTHOLD LAUFER, Curator of Anthropology, Field Museum of Nat-
ural History, Chicago, Illinois.
CLARK WISSLER, Curator of Anthropology, American Museum of
Natural History, New York City.
84 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION
JAMES R. ANGELL, Dean of the Faculties of Arts, Literature, and
Science, and Head of the Department of Psychology, University
of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois.
RAYMOND DODGE, Professor of Psychology, Wesleyan University,
Middletown, Connecticut.
W. D. SCOTT, Professor of Psychology, Northwestern University,
Evanston, Illinois; Associate Director, Bureau of Personnel Re-
search, Carnegie Institute of Technology, Pittsburgh, Pennsyl-
vania.
C. B. SEASHORE, Dean of the Graduate College, and Professor of
Psychology, State University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa.
E. L. THORNDIKE, Professor of Educational Psychology, Teachers'
College, Columbia University, New York City.
G. M. WHIPPLE, Professor of Educational Research, University of
Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Members at Large
S. I. FRANZ, Scientific Director, Government Hospital for the Insane,
Washington, D. C.
P. E. GODDARD, Curator of Ethnology, American Museum of Natural
History, New York City.
ALES HRDLICKA, Curator of Physical Anthropology, American Mu-
seum of Natural History, New York City.
L. M. TERMAN, Professor of Education, Leland Stanford Junior Uni-
versity, Stanford University, California.
A. M. TOZZER, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, and Curator of
Middle American Archaeology and Ethnology, Peabody Museum
of American Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University,
Cambridge, Massachusetts.
MARGARET F. WASHBURN, Professor of Psychology, Vassar College,
Poughkeepsie, N. Y.
A representative of the Government Division.
VOL. XVII. No. 4. FEBRUARY 12, 1920
THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS
CHEISTIANITY AND HISTORY
I. INTRODUCTION
THE great historians of antiquity were writers of modern history.
Herodotus, Thucydides, Polybius, Tacitus, were interested in
what had happened because of what was happening, and great things
were happening in their day. Herodotus writing, as he said, "in
order that the great and wondrous deeds of both Greeks and bar-
barians may not be effaced by time" massed his facts around that
world-stirring crisis which had just been passed, the Persian wars,
Thucydides, persuaded that "former ages were not great either in
their wars or in anything else," believed that the war that passed
before his eyes was the greatest event in the world's history, and he
bent his life's energies to describing it. Polybius, too, carried off
to Rome in the track of her victorious armies, saw as a captive the
miraculous dawn of that first empire of the Mediterranean world,
and he wrote his history to explain it. "Who is so poor-spirited,"
he says, "or so indolent as not to want to know by what means the
Romans in something less than fifty-three years subdued the world. ' '
Livy's vision was also always fastened upon the imperial present
and the calm, clear-headed patriotism which had brought it about.
Tacitus lacked this generous enthusiasm, but his interests were
never antiquarian ; the great age in which he lived drew his observa-
tion and supplied him with his task. From the clash of East and
West in the Ionian cities in the sixth century B.C., whereby the critical
curiosity of men and societies was first made active, to the tragic close
of the drama of the ancient world, almost a thousand years later, his-
tory was centered upon the few great epochal events and the charac-
ters that dominated the world in which each writer lived.
But there was one event of supreme importance that had no
Herodotus to gather up its priceless details, no Polybius to weld it
into the world's history with scientific insight and critical acumen
the rise of Christianity. 1 The product of obscure enthusiasts in an
i Cf. V. Soden, Das Interesse des Apostolischen Zeitalters in der Evan-
gelischen Geschichte, in Theologische Abhandlungen.
85
86 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
obscure and despised oriental people, it did not win more than a
disdainful paragraph (in Tacitus) at the hands of pagan historians.
Its own writings 1 were but poor attempts at history compared with
what other lesser events produced. When the scanty texts of the
sayings and doings of Jesus were taking the shape in which we have
them now, a Plutarch was writing biographies of all the pagan heroes.
But no Christian Plutarch appeared for another three centuries;
and then all that the learned Jerome was able to preserve for us was
three or four paragraphs on the lives of the leading apostles. 2
There were several reasons for this. In the first place Chris-
tianity began in a most humble way and among the unlettered. It
did not burst out in a flame of conquest like Mohammedanism, but
crept, half-hidden, along the foundations of society. Its very ob-
scurity left little to chronicle. If it changed the lives of men, they
were lives too insignificant to be noticed by history. Only in the
present age, after democracy itself has learned to read and begun
to think, is the historian awakening to the spiritual forces in the
lives of the obscure. But even now we pay little attention to such
seemingly extraneous elements as the beliefs of foreign immigrants
settled in our city slums the class that furnished the majority of
the early converts to Christianity. In any case the Greco-Roman
world troubled itself little about the history of the Jews and less
still about that of the Christians. 3
Even when Christianity had penetrated the society of the
learned, moreover, it stimulated little historical investigation. Pagan
savants, like Celsus, 4 sometimes challenged the sources of Christian
tradition and scripture, 5 but for the most part the great controversy
between Christian and pagan writers took place in fields that lay
beyond the scope of history. Christianity was a religion, not a
thing of politics, and although, as we shall see, the problem of fitting
it into the Jewish and then into the gentile setting did involve his-
torical conceptions, yet the main interests awakened by it were
2 Jerome's De Viris illustrious, written after the model of Suetonius' Viri
illustres.
s The emphasis which subsequent ages has placed upon references to Juda-
ism and Christianity in pagan writers has given those passages an altogether
factitious prominence. There are at best only a very few, and those are mostly
either incidental or pointed with ridicule. Cf. Th. Reinach, Textes d'Auteurs
grecs et romains relatifs au juda'isme, Tennis, traduits et annotes (1895) ; the
opening sections of the monumental work of Jean Juster, Les Juifs dans I' Em-
pire remain, leur condition juridique, economique et sociale, 2 vols., 1914. Emil
Schiirer's Geschichte des jiidischen VolTces im Zeitalter Jesu Christi (3 vols.,
1901-1911, also in English translation) remains the standard work on the period.
See also articles in the Jewish Encyclopaedia dealing with the Diaspora.
* See below.
s As Apion did those of the Jews.
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 87
theological. This meant that history, as a record of mere human
events, was bound to suffer ; for the theology, in so far as it concerned
itself with those events, sought to transfer them from the realm of
human action to that of divine grace, and so to interpret the phe-
nomena of time and change in terms of a timeless and unchanging
Deity. The western world has since gratefully built its theology
upon the conceptions so brilliantly worked out by the Fathers, and
the historian whose business it is to register the judgments of society
can not fail to appreciate their great formative influence in the his-
tory of thought. But their very success was a loss to history; for
it placed the meaning of human effort outside the range of humanity,
and so impressed upon the western world a fundamentally unhis-
torical attitude of mind.
The motive force which accomplished this theological victory
was faith. Faith was the chief intellectual demand which Chris-
tianity made of its converts. 7 By it the mind was enabled to view
events in a perspective which reached beyond the limits of time and
space into that imaginary over-world which we know as Eternity.
Faith did more than remove mountains, it removed the whole ma-
terial environment of life. There have been few such triumphs of
the spirit as it achieved in those early days of the new religion.
But the fact remains that this achievement was largely at the cost
of history. Faith, one can see from the criticism of those first really
conscious historians, the Ionian Greeks, is an impediment to genuine
history, unless the imagination which it quickens is kept within
control. The historian needs rather to confirm his imagination with
skepticism and to be more upon his guard against believing when-
ever he feels the will to believe than at any other time which, in
the realm of religious virtues has generally been mistaken for a sin. 8
Moreover, over and above the fact that faith puts a premium upon
credulity, 9 it indicates an absence of any real, serious interest in
historical data. When one "takes a thing on faith," it is because
one is intent upon using it for something else of more importance
6 It is significant to see how the conception of the essential unhistoricity of
God, as a Being beyond the reach of change, has been growingly modified in
modern times. The increase in the number of those mystics who have revised
their theology in terms of modern science and philosophy (especially Bergson-
ian), is, from the standpoint of the history of pure thought, the most decisive
triumph of the historical spirit. The Deity himself becomes historical; eternity
disappears; all is time and change.
7 Charity was hardly an intellectual virtue, at least as conceived by the
Fathers.
s There are all kinds of faith, to be sure. We are speaking only of relig-
ious faith, -which transfers phenomena from the natural to the supernatural
world and is, therefore, the chief opponent of rationalism.
8 As Celsus, the pagan critic, so cogently suggested.
88 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
so important, indeed, that often while still unrealized it can clothe
with reality the very condition upon which it depends. Thus the
"will to believe'' can master phenomena in a way not permitted to
historians. Faith and scientific history to not readily work together.
If this is clear in the dawn of Greek history, when science con-
quered faith, it stands out even more clearly still in that very antith-
esis of the creations of Hellas, which we may best term the gospel
according to Paul. 10 Nowhere else in the world's literature is there
a call to faith like that of Paul, and few, even of the great creators
of religious doctrine, have been more indifferent than he to the his-
torical data, upon which, in the order of nature, that faith would
seem to rest. The Apostle to the Gentiles cared little for the details
of the life of Jesus, and boasted of his indifference. 11 He learned of
the divinity of Christ by a flash of revelation which marked him out
as one of the prophets. Then the desert, rather than Jerusalem,
furnished him that tremendous plan of Christian doctrine upon which
Christian orthodoxy still rests, which included the whole drama of
humanity from the Creation and the Fall to the Redemption and the
vision of its meaning, revealed on the road to Damascus. The plan
was based upon the law and the prophets, but only because Paul's
thought ran in terms of their teaching. His scheme was one that
needed no verification from the sources even of sacred scripture, if
once it could carry conviction by inner experience. 12
Finally the faith of early Christianity was largely involved in a
doctrine which centered attention not in this world but in the world
to come; and the world to come was about to come at any moment.
Immortality for the individual was a doctrine shared by other
mystery religions of the pagan world; but only Christianity de-
veloped out of the apocalyptic literature of the Jews the vaster
dream of an imminent cataclysm in which the world to come should
come for all at once. While this doctrine appears in full force in
Christian circles only from the latter part of the first to the middle
of the second century, and was most developed in circles given over
to what might be viewed, even by ecclesiastics, as extreme spiritual-
ity, it undoubtedly had a large and damaging influence upon Chris-
tian historiography. There is nothing which so effectively destroys
our interest in the past as to live under the shadow of a great and
impending event. It would not have been the same had each indi-
!0 And we must regard Paul as the intellectual creator of Christian theology.
11 Cf. the first, second and third chapters of Galatians.
12 The Pauline doctrine involved a conceptual parallel to history, which ap-
parently furnished a better past to the world, one more reasonable and more
probable than that which actually had been the case.
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 89
vidual convert merely been keenly aware of the shortness of his own
life and the vision of the coming day of judgment. That is still and
has always been a perspective before religious minds; and however
strange it may seem, it does not entirely kill the interest in the
origin and evolution of these things which are so soon to vanish
from before the eyes of death. Such is the vital instinct in us. 13
But it is a different thing for heaven and earth and all mankind to
pass away at once as these early Christians expected them to do at
any time. A few years ago we were to pass through the tail of a
comet and there was some speculation as to whether its deadly gases
might not exterminate all life on this globe. Had the probability
been more probable, had astronomers and men of science determined
the fact by some experimental proof, with what breathless and
hypnotic gaze we should have watched the measured coming of that
star across the gulfs of space ! Our vast, unresting industries would
cease ; for there would be no to-morrow to supply. Our discoveries
in science, our creations in art would be like so many useless monu-
ments in an untenanted world and science and art would have no
incentive to go on. The one interest for us all would be that grow-
ing point of light that doom, swift, inevitable, universal. Here
comes a problem in psychology. For as a matter of fact that same
doom is coming; we know it with absolute certainty; we know there
can be no escape. How many of those who saw that comet pass will
be alive fifty years from now? In a century, at most, the earth will
be the sepulcher of all just as much a sepulcher as if the race had
perished in one grand catastrophe. And what a little interval is a
century! Yet our mills worked on, our discoveries continued, our
art went on producing its visions of beauty; and above all, we in-
creased our interest in the distant past, digging for history in the
hills of Crete and Asia and working as never before to rescue and
reconstruct the past from archives and libraries. Why? Because
humanity is more to us than our individual lives; and the future is
a reality through it. If humanity were to disappear and no future
be possible we should lose our reckoning, along with our sense of
values, like Browning's Lazarus, who has had a vision of eternity,
but has lost track of time.
So it was in the millennial atmosphere of the early church. How-
ever vaguely or definitely the triumph of "the Kingdom" was
is The influence of the belief in immortality upon historical perspectives in-
vites our attention here; but the subject is too intricate for hurried considera-
tion. Undoubtedly the emphasis upon a contrast between time and eternity ob-
scured the understanding of the meaning of phenomena in their time-setting.
90 TEE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
reckoned, 14 the belief in its approach carried the mind away from
earthly affairs and their history. Men who drew their inspiration
from it had but little interest in the splendor of a Roman state or
in the long procession of centuries in which were painfully evolved
the institutions of pagan law and government, institutions which
not only safeguarded the heritage of antique culture but made pos-
sible the extension of Christianity.
The only history of importance to the Christian was that which
justified his faith, and it all lay within the sacred writings of the
Jews. So, as the vision of the judgment day became fainter and
the Church proceeded to settle itself in time and not in eternity
it looked back to a different past from that which lay beyond the
i* The conception of a millennium, drawn from the later Jewish literature,
was that Christ and his saints would rule for a thousand years; but in spite of
much calculation the belief was never quite reduced to successful mathematics.
It is interesting, in passing, to see how it drew upon that other interest in
chronology, the plotting out of a future instead of a past, which astrology best
illustrates. In fact the millennium may be said to be a sort of Christian equiva-
lent for astrology. In the earlier prophets the Messianic Kingdom is to last
forever (cf. Ezekiel, 37:25, etc.), a conception found also in the apostolic age
(John, 12:34). Jeremiah, however, had risked a prophecy of Jewish delivery
from captivity at the end of seventy years (25:12), but when his dream of
deliverance was not realized the later prophets had to find an explanation, and
apocalyptic literature developed a reckoning which should save the validity of
the earlier. This was definitely the occasion of Daniel's attempt (chapter 9),
which has taxed the mathematics of every apocalyptic dreamer to the present
day. The conception of a thousand years came late, and perhaps rests on very
extended use of symbolic interpretation. According to Psalms 90:4, a day
with God is as a thousand years. Combine this with the six days of Creation
in Genesis and by analogy the world's work will go on for six such days, or
six thousand years, and then the Messiah will reign for a Sabbath of a thousand
years. This idea is found only once in the Talmud. It was developed in detail,
for Christians, in Eevelations (cf. 20:4, "They lived and reigned with Christ a
thousand years"). Through Jewish and Christian apocalypses the doctrine was
taken up, sometimes with, sometimes without, the mathematical data. By the
middle of the second century it began to subside, and although Montanism in
the early third century revived it, it was henceforth regarded as somewhat
tinged with heresy and Judaism. In the learned circles, Neoplatonic mysticism,
as taught by Origen, superseded the crudities of the millennistic faith. * { It was
only the chronologists and historians of the church who, following Julius Afri-
canus, made use of apocalyptic numbers in their calculations, while court theo-
logians like Eusebius entertained the imperial table with discussions as to
whether the dining-hall of the emperor the second David and Solomon, the be-
loved of God might not be the new Jerusalem of John's Apocalypse." (A.
Harnack, article "Millennium" in Encyclopedia Britannica. This article fur-
nishes an admirable survey and bibliography. See the treatment of Christian
eschatology in the various works of E. H. Charles in the field of apocalyptic
literature.)
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 91
pagan world. The sacred scriptures of the Jews had replaced the
literature of antiquity. A revolution was taking place in the his-
tory of history. Homer and Thucydides, Polybius and Livy, the
glory of the old regime, shared a common fate. The scientific out-
put of the most luminous minds the world had known was classed
with the legends that had grown up by the campfires of primitive
barbarians. All was pagan; which meant that all was delusive and
unreliable except where it could be tested in the light of the new
religion or where it forced itself by the needs of life into the world
of common experience.
There is no more momentous revolution in the history of thought
than this, in which the achievements of thinkers and workers, of
artists, philosophers, poets and statesmen, were given up for the
revelation of prophets and a gospel of worldly renunciation. The
very success of the revolution blinds us to its significance; for our
own world-view has been molded by it. Imagine, for instance, what
the perspectives of history would have been had there been no Chris-
tianity, or if it had remained merely a sect of Judaism, to be ignored
or scorned! Religion carried history away from the central themes
of antiquity to a nation that had little to offer except the religion.
The story of Israel could not, from the very nature of its situa-
tion, be more than an incident in the drama of nations. The great
empires of the east lay on either side of it, and the land of promise
turned out to be a pathway of conquering armies. From the desert
beyond Jordan new migrations of Semite nomads moved in for the
plunder of the Jews as the Jews themselves had plundered the land
before. On the west Philistine and Phoenician held the harbors and
the sea. Too small a nation for a career of its own, exposed and
yet secluded, the borderer of civilization, Israel could produce no
rich culture like its more fortunately situated neighbors. When
unmolested for a time, it too could achieve rapid progress in its
fortress towns. But no sooner was its wealth a temptation than the
Assyrian was at the gates. It is small wonder, then, if in spite of
the excellence oi: much of the historical literature embedded in the
Old Testament, even the best of it, such as the stories woven around
the great days of Saul and David, when compared with the narrative
of Polybius' or even with that of Herodotus leaves the jwcture of petty
kinglets of an isolated tribe, reaching out for a brief interval to
touch the splendors of Tyre and Sidon, and vaguely aware of the
might and wealth of Egypt.
The one contribution of the Jews to the world was in a field
which offers history few events to chronicle. As we have insisted
above, it was a contribution of the first magnitude, to be treasured
by succeeding ages above all the arts and sciences of antiquity. But
92 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
its very superiority lay in its unwbrldliness, in its indifference to the
passing fortunes of man or nations, which make up the theme of
history. This at least was the side of Judaism which Christianity
seized upon and emphasized. But there could be little for history
in any case in a religion born of national disaster and speaking by
revelation. The religion which is born of disaster must either falsify
realities by a faith which reads victory in defeat like the inspira-
tion of Mahomet fleeing on his camel from the victorious unbelievers,
yet chanting, "Who hath given us the victory!" Or it must take
refuge in the realm of the spirit, where the triumphs of the world,
its enemy, are met with indifference or scorn. In either case the
perspective is distorted. Revelation may save the future by stirring
hope and awakening confidence; but it will falsify the past with
the same calm authority as it dictates the conduct of the present
falsify, that is, in the eyes of science. In its own eyes it is lord of
circumstance and master of phenomena, and the records of the cen-
turies must come to its standards, not it to theirs.
It was, therefore, a calamity, for historiography, that the new
standards won the day. The authority of a revealed religion sanc-
tioned but one scheme of history through the vast and intricate
evolution of the antique world. A well-nigh insurmountable ob-
stacle was erected to scientific inquiry, one which has at least taken
almost nineteen centuries to surmount.
Not only was the perspective perverted, and the perversion made
into a creed, but the stern requirements of monotheistic theology
placed a veritable barrier against the investigation. The Christian
historian was not free to question the data as presented to him,
since the source was inspired. He might sometimes evade the
difficulty by reading new meanings into the data and so square them
with the rest of history, a device employed by every Father of the
church whose erudition and insight brought him face to face with
the difficulties of literal acceptance of the scriptures. But however
one might twist the texts, the essential outlines of the scheme of
history remained fixed. From the prophets of Jahve with their
high fanaticism and from Paul, the prophet of Jesus, there was but
one world-view, that dominated by the idea of a chosen people and
a special dispensation. The only difference between Christian and
Jewish outlook was that what had been present politics became
past history. The apostle to the Gentiles did not give up the Jewish
past. Pre-Christian history was in his eyes the same narrow story
of exclusive providence as it was in the eyes of the older prophets.
Gentiles had had no share in the dispensations of Jahve ; it was only
for the present and future that they might hope to enter into the
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 93
essential processes of historical evolution. The past to Paul was
what it was to a Pharisee.
This exclusive attitude of Christianity with reference to the past
was in striking contrast with the attitude of contemporaneous pagan-
ism, which was growingly liberal with increasing knowledge. To
attack the story of Jahve's governance of the world was, for a
Christian, sacrilege, since the story itself was sacred. A pagan, with
a whole pantheon to turn to, placed no such value upon any one
myth and therefore was free to discount them all. His eternal
salvation did not rest upon his belief in them; and, moreover, he
did not concern himself so much about his salvation in any case.
When the belief in an immortality was bound up with the accept-
ance of a scheme of history, the acceptance was assured. What is
the dead past of other people's lives, when compared with the
unending future of one's own? History yielded to the demands of
eternity.
Moreover in its emphasis upon the Messiahship of Jesus, Chris-
tianity fastened upon one of the most exclusive aspects of Jewish
thought. Such history as the proof of this claim involved was along
the line of a narrow, fanatic, national movement. Christianity, it is
true, opened the Messianic Kingdom to the whole world, but it
justified its confidence in the future by an appeal to the stricter out-
lines of a tribal faith in the past. And yet that appeal, in spite of
its limitations, was the source of such historical research as Chris-
tianity produced. For, when pressed by pagan critics to reconcile
their claims with those of Greeks or Egyptians, the Fathers were
obliged to work out not merely a theory of history their theology
supplied them with that but a scheme of chronology. The simple
problem, so lightly attacked, as to whether Moses or the Greeks
should have the priority as lawgiver forced the apologists to some
study of comparative history. While in this particular issue they
had a somewhat easy triumph, 15 there was a danger, which is obvious
to us now, in too much reliance upon the chronology of the Old Testa-
ment, and especially in placing an emphasis upon ithe literal text.
The trenchant criticism of their opponents, therefore, led the fathers
to adopt that allegorical type of interpretation, which they learned
from the Greeks themselves, and which is so useful wherever there
is a need for holding fast to a text while letting the meaning go. We
shall therefore find the chief developments of Christian historiog-
raphy during the first three centuries following these two lines, of
is One of the earliest and best short statements of this claim is that made
by Tatian in his Address to the Greeks, chapter 31 ff. It is strikingly in line
with Josephus's protest in Against Apion.
94 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
allegory and symbolism on the one hand and of comparative chron-
ology on the other.
JAMES T. SHOTWELL.
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY.
(To be continued.^
SOCIETIES
THE NINETEENTH ANNUAL MEETING OF THE AMERI-
CAN PHILOSOPHICAL ASSOCIATION
PHILOSOPHY IN THE MAKING
TO those who gathered at Ithaca for philosophical disputation
during ths closing days of December, any retrospective ac-
count of the proceedings is bound to appear inadequate; while for
the many to whom zero weather and remoteness of place proved in-
superable barriers nothing in the way of a mere summary of events
could possibly communicate more than a vague notion of what was
missed. Not that the arguments of the papers read were unrepro-
ducible, nor that the more notable of the 'attractions of our brief
and wintry sojourn at Cornell University were so vaporous as to
admit of no description. The difficulty of doing justice to the nine-
teenth annual meeting of American philosophers is due to the fact
that this year .as in many previous years not the least of the inspira-
tion and pleasure came from impromptu speeches, witty repartee,
chance remarks uttered at luncheon or in intermissions, or in the
glow of the blazing log fires lighted in Prudence Risley Hall after
dinner. Such effervescences of humor and spontaneity and keen-
ness are impossible now to recapture. Easier, almost, would it be
to bring back to life the flames of those same log fires or the smiles
and words of greeting with which old friends and cordial acquaint-
ances rejoined to commune for a short while upon problems as an-
cient as the first Platonists and as well adapted as in their day to
the fostering of a peculiar degree of good fellowship. The kind of
thing one might recall though without thereby reinstating the
whole rich context is the circumstance that Miss Follett called
Professor Sheldon sentimental; that Professor Urban ^accused Pro-
fessor Cohen of talking about loona, fide ghosts ; that Professor Cohen
scored against his opponents by an invidious analogy with the Al-
mighty; that Professor Crookes in correction of Professor Mon-
tague attributed pain to Erin rather than to the individual Irish-
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 95
man; that Professor Montague made a pleasant point about
stationary balloons; or that everybody quarreled with everybody
else, in the abstract, and made up and quarreled again with such
lightness and easualness that it might have been toys of sawdust
that were the matter of controversy instead of the eternal verities.
Rhapsodies on snow and fire and the very charming hospitality
of Cornell University even on the playful banterings and sallies
of philosophers in their less serious mood' are not within the strict
scope of this review. But, as was protested at the beginning, a mere
digest of the papers listed on the programme would not properly
represent the proceedings of the nineteenth annual meeting with
which we are concerned. The reviewer in fact can not, with a clear
conscience, proceed to such a digest without first having made an
effort to communicate the incommunicable without having first en-
deavored to render articulate a sense of that very friendly, almost
unworldly comradeship, that spirit of the Crusader, which imparted
to the act of gathering together for argumentation 'something of the
sacramental character of a deliberately renewed dedication to the
great enterprise of philosophy. The problems of metaphysics may
be uninfluenced by human attention and safe from the vicissitudes
of temporal fate and the caprice of personalities, but to them as ob-
jects of discussion, at least, the question of the temperament of the
disputants is not irrelevant. For an auspicious cooperation in the
search for truth and enduring values, it is indeed far from being a
matter of indifference that the band of searchers should be distin-
guished from the rest of mankind by possession of rather special
qualities. That philosophers, as a class, are not as other men that
they are humaner, simpler, more devoted to things of changeless
worth, more ardent and quixotic in pursuit of their calling, more
childishly sincere, has always seemed to one at least who has sat at
their feet an indisputable fact and a sufficient reason for a desire to
emulate them. And unless an ineradicable illusion falsified all ap-
pearances it was this humanity, this ardor, this sincerity, that
warmed and inspired the Ithaca meetings where certain of those
changeless values, certain of the eternal verities were pondered and
searched for. For the actual success of such searchings, virtues even
of kindliness and humor are probably not wholly without signifi-
cance. Certainly one clear consequence of the quality of mind I am
praising is the lack of discrimination against women on the ground
of sex which characterizes men who are philosophers from men of
some other persuasions. Not every learned society treats the pres-
ence of women with a cordiality that is untainted by a perfunctory
tolerance. To be grateful for the absence of such tolerance is per-
96 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
haps an unfitting recognition of a liberality of mind no greater than
is supposed to be the prerequisite to becoming a philosopher; and
yet in this world, where many claims to liberality are made in the
absence of its demonstration, that gratitude can not easily be alto-
gether suppressed.
The theme that commanded principal attention was the nature
of the community. Of the six appointed leaders for the discussion
of this subject three failed to appear. In consequence, some at least
of the challenges of Miss Follett, Professor Urban, and Professor
Cohen were safe from counter^challenge, and the time left over was
used for a more extensive discussion from the floor than would
otherwise have been possible. One is as little moved to resignation
over the absence of Professor Tufts, Dean Pound, and Professor
Jjaski as over that of the many other members of the association
whose active participation might have been hoped for. Yet one cer-
tain good coming out of an evil so great as approximate non-repre-
gentation of Yale, Princeton, Harvard and Columbia was the in-
formality and intimacy of the Ithaca meetings which were unques-
tionably due to the relative scantiness of attendance.
Miss Follett 's contention was that community is not a thing but
a process, her bolts being directed primarily against pluralistic and
monistic ghosts. The only thing that is real is the individual, was
iher plea ; the only thing that counts is the individual. The individ-
ual must not, however, be thought of as a being bereft of relations
and only acquiring such relations by virtue of action. On this
ground, and quite unwarrantably as Professor Montague showed in
his retort, she accused the realists of postulating entities totally un-
related to one another. What, of course she was after was the ac-
knowledgment of a degree of relatedness an interrelation amount-
ing to positive interpenetration such as only an idealist could either
wish for or admit. By virtue of correct interpenetration she antic-
ipated the attainment by all individuals of all their desires without
diminution or compromise. The undesirability of compromise in
any respect was obviously to her not merely a Utopian ideal but a
practical basis for action. Quite justly Professor Cohen charged
her with being willing to make an advance toward betterment only
if 'assured of immediate attainment of absolute perfection. How-
ever noble her ideal of a society in which all should be completely
satisfied, she was certainly unable to give a satisfactory solution in
terms of interpenetration of the problem regarding the proper choice
of a school by two parents of opposite opinion.
On the matter of community ghosts, at least, Professor Cohen
aligned himself with Miss Follett. To him, as to her, the individual
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 97
alone is real, though it is an individual admittedly linked to his
fellow man 'by all the 'bonds and relations of custom and affection.
The plea that the individual behaves differently when isolated does
not, 'however, prove anything about the reality of a communal mind.
All physical objects likewise are by artificial segregation altered in
their behavior. But the reduction of whatever mind there is in a
group to the sum of individual minds involved, is not to be followed
by a similar reduction of corporate responsibility to a mere aggre-
gate of smaller individual responsibilities. Professor Cohen made
the interesting point that the unreality of a community ghost does
not imply the unreality of obligations attributable to such a ghost.
In other words, when persons amalgamate into any league or union
into a guild or a corporation or a 'nation they 'bring upon them-
selves rights and duties which formerly were not theirs, and which
even now are not private, or due to their own merits or demerits.
The first matter for comment in Professor Urban 's discussion of
the community is his position regarding the status of those "ghosts"
about which the earlier speakers had been agreed. For him these
debatable essences are not merely valuable but actual ; they are, Mr.
Mclver notwithstanding, both completely realized and concrete. Not
merely realism but monism was thus invoked, whereupon, advanc-
ing to the matter of the state, which he had observed could not be
excluded from any consideration as to the nature of community,
Professor Urban made the interesting point that omnicompetence for
the state should mean not control of all the interests of the individ-
uals concerned, but an oversight of all individuals in some respects.
In further support of his own realism, and in criticism of an illus-
tration used in opposition to it, he noted that communities are of
two distinct types : the involuntary, which we are 'born into ; and the
voluntary, which we deliberately commit ourselves to or gratuitously
fabricate. The philosophical association is of the second class and
accordingly can not in fairness be cited as a typical instance of com-
munity in general.
In the opinion of the reviewer the important oppositions revealed
in the discussions of the leaders and their critics are capable of
something like reconciliation 'by making use of the important dis-
tinction of subsistence and existence 'as the two possible forms of
reality which a thing may possess. On the one hand it seems quite
clear that, as the opponents of the community ghost argued, the
gathering of individuals together into any kind of association does
not generate an additional mind in the sense in which the word
mind is used in psychology. There is no nervous system for such a
mind to be correlated with, no indication of its locus. On the other
98 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
hand, many of the conditions and consequences of the mind that we
thus deny are clearly present. Rights, duties, obligations, are there
which would never have arisen for consciousnesses in isolation, and
which are not now reducible to an aggregation of the separate and
particular obligations and privileges of the constituent members of
the organization. We seem then to have properties and conse-
quences of a consciousness, with no consciousness whose properties
and 'Consequences they are; and an absence of certain other attri-
butes, such as spatial determination, ordinarily regarded as invari-
able conditions of all existents, at the same time with the undeniable
reality in some sense notwithstanding of the thing whose existence
is thus tacitly denied. If an existent mind over and above the par-
ticular minds of the totality of individuals is not to be discovered,
there is every ground for admitting a subsistent one, without a
locus, as is every universal though with no less actuality for that.
Professor Urban cited Mclver as a defender of a communal mind as
value. Not all universals are reducible to values ; some may properly
be designated validities, devoid of spatial and temporal specifica-
tions, 'but more importantly operative sometimes in the world of
time and space than any of that world's visible and concrete partic-
ulars. Of such then might the disputed communal mind be inter-
preted to be, without forfeiting thereby its character and without
claiming membership in the class of existents.
Miss Calkins 's paper on the Metaphysical Monist as Sociological
Pluralist may best be referred to at this point, not because it offered
any reconciliation of the particular oppositions we have been con-
sidering, but because it showed the compatability of monism and
pluralism when manifested respectively in metaphysics and in soci-
ology. Her point was that ' ' one may hold the numerically monistic
conception of the universe as absolute, and even as absolute Self or
Person, without thereby committing oneself to the conception of the
social group as literally a person or self." On the one hand she
held that "the usual empirical arguments are insufficient to estab-
lish a genuine sociological monism, and on the other hand that no
a priori consideration forbids the conclusion that between the hu-
man and near-human selves . . . and the all-including absolute self
. . . there are no intervening self-conscious persons."
Another paper that 'bore upon the main topic of the sessions was
that of Professor Swenson on the Logical Implicates of Community.
The main contention here was that since the basis and necessary
condition of community is understanding, a stable and shared uni-
verse of logical terms and relations is likewise its prerequisite. The
truth of a realistic metaphysics is then a social need, since the alter-
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 99
native theory would mean a world in flux, with no means either of
communication or understanding, which could serve as a basis for
social organization.
Professor Sharp's contribution concerned a matter for social
philosophy, though not specifically for a philosophy of the state.
It was entitled The Fair Wage, and undertook to demonstrate under
what conditions a departure from equality of wages for equal
length of labor was necessary and desirable. He brought out clearly
the opposition between the economic standpoint on the fair wage
problem, and the ethical standpoint regarding the obligation to grati-
tude. This paper was an unusually searching analysis of a subject in
which there is much confusion of thought.
Another, though quite unrelated occasion for search for compro-
mise was treated of in Professor H. W. Wright's paper on Rational
Self-Interest and the Social Adjustment. Equally false and detri-
mental to rational ethics in his view is an interpretation of human
nature which overlooks its frankly egoistic and selfish bias, and a
scheme of salvation which emphasizes out of all proportion the need
for self -'sacrifice. The true state of the case is rather that, psycho-
logically, man is voracious of personal good, and, ethically, that he
must sacrifice certain of his immediate personal ends to ends more
remote and more altruistic.
Professor Chandler's paper, entitled The Inner Check as a Prin-
ciple consisted of an exposition and criticism of some fundamental
doctrines in the philosophy of Paul Elmer More. It demonstrated
the mysticism, and on the whole uncalled-for and unsatisfactory
mysticism, of that litterateur as he manifests it in his interpretation
of Plato. On the same afternoon with this incursion into the mys-
teries of mysticism there were two other departures from thought
upon community, one by Professor Montague into the fields of biol-
ogy and psychology, the other by Helen Parkhurst into the realm
of esthetics. The latter undertaking consisted of an attempt to
account for beauty of content or idea in art, as distinguished
from beauty of form by means of a special development of the prin-
ciple of blended rhythm and arhythm. Professor Montague in his
paper entitled Pre-Teleology and Orthogenesis set forth the possi-
bility of a hitherto unused and very significant application of the
vector principle of physics. As a preliminary to this he dwelt upon
the importance of the similarity between the spontaneous origina-
tion of a new idea, and the spontaneous appearance of a biological
variation. In both cases there are antecedents which to some degree
are incorporated in the new product, and in both cases that product
is likewise qualitatively different from anything that went before.
100 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
It is a summing up, but, more importantly, an advance. Vector
additions are a third thing manifesting these characters, and the
assimilation of biology 'and psychology to physics in respect of this
most difficult phenomenon of innovation was made to appear plaus-
ible, and perhaps capable of far-reaching elaborations.
Two protests of a rather fundamental kind were set forth in two
brilliant papers, one by Professor Creighton, the other by Professor
Sheldon. In the former, the protest was against the traditional
view of philosophy as something abstract and. not necessarily ex-
plicative of the more human things of life. The best, however, that
we can hope from it is, Professor Creighton contended, to make us
ieel at home in the world, and the sooner we get rid of the wrong
conception of philosophy, the sooner shall we cease complaining
about its lack of progress, and begin to derive benefit from it. Inci-
dentally, of course, the only hope is to get a real comprehension of
the concrete universal.
By The New Tyranny Professor Sheldon meant the present fash-
ionable obsession with the social as opposed to the individual. His
paper was an eloquent tirade against the multitudinous and insidious
forms of this modern disease which has left its mark upon our in-
tellectual enterprises and controlled our living. We are forgetting,
in our zeal for social values, the many that are individual and for-
feiting thereby those goods that .accrue to a more self-respecting and
more noble egoism.
To close with the paper which actually opened the first session,
we have Professor Townsend's Church and Society which compre-
hended some interesting analysis. The practical nature of medi-
eval argumentation, which often we falsely interpret out of context
end as highly abstract exercises in logic, was the point particularly
stressed. Much was made of the two interpretations of Plato, as a
defender of universals that exist, i. e., that are in time and space,
and as a defender of what has validity, but a validity that is the
outcome of mental operations. The important, and in the opinion
of the reviewer the true, notion of what Plato meant by the reality
of his Ideas was not touched upon. But an elaboration of this point,
as of the many others that tempt to further controversy would
carry this account far beyond its proper limits.
It is with renewed regret, moreover, that we have to close with-
out having incorporated in a review of the nineteenth annual meet-
ing of American philosophers a summary of what, as we noted at the
beginning must in the nature of the case go unrecorded. Of this
kind are the many impromptu speeches notably those of Professor
Overstreet and Professor Swenson into which was injected a cer-
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 101
tain fine flavor, a glow and a beauty that are unrecoverable. Of this
kind also was the very special degree of welcome and hospitality
accorded by our hosts and expressed in the welcoming speech of
President Schurmann. In ancient days, philosophical disputations
were of the nature of love feasts. "Wine and dance and song were
fitting interludes for the rhapsodies in which the true, the beautiful
and the good were praised and men communicated to one another
their loftier and more spiritual allegiances. It is not often nowa-
days that we can approximate, howsoever remotely, to a revival of
the Platonic banquet. Our speculations are carried on in ugly
class-rooms ; social and intellectual enthusiasms are lamentably di-
vorced; and oftentim.es we 'are depredating in our approach to the
interests which should be publicly admitted to be our greatest glory.
We have forgotten that the true is compatible with the beautiful
that it is, the eloquent Presidential address of Professor Alexander
should serve as a forcible reminder. But in rather uncommon meas-
ure the drabness of ordinary congregation for debate was lost in the
unusual conditions and special fortune of the Ithaca meeting. Not
a perfectly revived Platonic banquet, to be sure but something in
many features like it. On the day when the men of the association
take their courage in their hands and, instead of waiting in nervous
expectation for the moment of disbanding, bravely and gladly unite
the joys of philosophy with those of smoke even in the presence of
ladies on that day one step forward will have been taken to Pla-
tonic, and other millennia.
HELEN Huss PARKHURST.
BARNARD COLLEGE.
REVIEWS AND ABSTRACTS OF LITERATURE
Strife of Systems and Productive Duality: An Essay in Philosophy.
WILMON HENRY SHELDON. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press. 1918. Pp. x + 534.
The attempt to bring out the significance of Sheldon's book by
"placing" it among its peers in recent metaphysical literature,
moves me to venture, perhaps too rashly, the generalization that the
metaphysicians of our age, at least in England and America,
gravitate towards one or other of two types. Either, like Bosanquet.
they regard metaphysics as "the communication of a grave experi-
ence, and not the mere framework of a theory" and as "knowledge
carrying deep conviction and appealing to our whole being" (cf.
The Principle of Individuality and Value, pp. 1, 2). Or, like Brad-
ley, they look upon metaphysics as an unusually obstinate attempt
102 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
to think consistently an attempt to play the game of thinking for
its own sake and according to its own. rules, which can succeed only
if thought is disentangled from the other functions of our being and
from the "finding of bad reasons for what we believe upon in-
stinct" (cf. Appearance and Reality, Pref. and Intr.). No doubt,
these two types can be approximated to each other. They would
agree on a programme framed in some such general terms as that
metaphysics is knowledge of reality as against mere appearance, or
of first principles, or of the universe as a whole. Bradley, for all
his emphasis on sheer thinking, may even be found to agree that
metaphysics seeks to satisfy the "mystical side of our nature" (I. c.
p. 6). Still, there is a profound difference, certainly of emphasis,
and on the whole amounting to a difference in kind. A metaphysi-
cian of Bosanquet's type will care relatively little for formal con-
sistency, but greatly for the matter of his argument, the quality of
the outlook upon the world which he is seeking to express and
communicate. He will want "to take for our standard what man
recognizes as value when his life is fullest and his soul at its highest
stretch" (Bosanquet, /. c., p. 3). He will take it for granted that,
if the "matter" of the argument is of the right sort, consistency
will, as it were, take care of itself; that in systematic theory it is
secured, not in virtue of any abstract "form" or scheme of deduc-
tion, but in virtue of the concrete insights we think with; that, in
fact, inconsistency is in the last resort due to defective insight. A
metaphysician of Bradley 's type, by contrast, will delight in the
dialectics which result whenever the emphasis is thrown on formal
consistency. The "grave experience" which he communicates is
the experience of the continued and inescapable defeat of all at-
tempts to think consistently, because the discursive and relational
nature of thought impales it unavoidably on the horns of the
antinomy of identity and difference. Thence is born his deep con-
viction that we must affirm an Absolute Experience, in the im-
mediacy of which all the antinomies of thought are harmonized, all
its contradictions somehow resolved.
Sheldon has affinities with both these types. His heart, if I
may so put it, pulls him towards the Bosanquetian, his head towards
the Bradleian type. The head wins in the end, but its victory
seems to me to be of that pyrrhic sort which really spells defeat.
For Sheldon, as for Bradley, the crux of philosophy lies in the
antinomies of thought, and especially in the antinomy of identity
and difference, externality and internality of relations. True,
Sheldon claims to succeed where Bradley fails. He claims to
possess in his Principle of Productive Duality a clue to the recon-
ciliation of opposites which is wholly perspicuous to thought, which
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 103
can be understood fully here and now, instead of being taken on
trust in the Absolute. With magnificent courage he claims to have
found the very solution of all problems, the very unifier of all
truths thought's homeopathic cure for thought's dialectical ills.
I am fascinated, but, frankly, not convinced. Sheldon's principle
seems to me too empty and abstract to possess the fertility he claims
for it. Being so abstract, no doubt it supplies a pattern into which
well-nigh everything can ibe fitted. I do not deny that it applies,
but is it my blindness? I am unable to perceive its power to
illuminate and guide. Like Bergson, Sheldon would by sheer
intensity of insight get at the very springs of creativeness. Like
Hegel, he believes this creativeness to be logical and therefore
capable of 'being understood, so that we can "see" how the very
categories are "generated." Like Hegel again, he realizes that the
secret of this logic lies in "negation," in the sense of the recognition
of otherness as compatible with sameness (cf. Bosanquet's similar
doctrine of negativity, in Ch. 5 of The Principle of Individuality
and Value}. In this last point Sheldon is, I agree, on the right
track, but what I doubt is that out of abstractions, however skilfully
distilled from the concrete, you can, reversing the process, generate
the concrete ; that from the bare notion of an assemblage of dyads
you can deduce the evolution of the actual world. If you could do
that, why could you not predict its future? But this is to antici-
pate. Let us first follow Sheldon's argument.
Sheldon's concept of the philosopher's task is nothing if not
concrete. He defines it as "the lifting, so far as he is able, of
man's whole load" (p. 4). In our humanitarian age, this load has
a practical as well as a theoretical side. Philosophy must contribute
"directly or indirectly toward the diminution of the great sum-
total of human suffering" (Hid.}. The "map of the world" which
it is the philosopher's business to furnish, must 'be a map for right
conduct too. Yet the value of knowledge is superior to the value
of practise, not in the sense that they are mutually exclusive so that,
in choosing tha one we must needs forego the other ; but in the sense
that the value of knowledge is twofold, in that we need it both
for its own sake and for the sake of utility (pp. 10, 11). Nay more,
the satisfaction of the want of knowledge is the condition for, and
by itself goes far towards, the satisfaction of all our other wants,
and for this reason philosophy is, even practically, man's most im-
portant concern. With this truly Platonic estimate of the function
and value of philosophy, no "lover of wisdom" will want to quarrel.
Moreover, Sheldon is delightfully catholic and concrete in his
ideal of a philosophy broad-based on the data of any and every kind
of experience. With Bertrand Russell's proposals for restricting
104 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
philosophy to abstractly tenable hypotheses, such as would be true
in all possible worlds, or with the same thinker's advocacy of
''ethical neutrality" he has, I am. glad to find, no sympathy what-
ever. "A philosophical system which has not built itself upon such
facts as the conservation of energy, wave-motion, the propagation of
life, the mystic's intuition of God, the laws of musical form, would
fee no adequate system" (p. 21). Clearly Sheldon is one of the
metaphysicians who, as I like to put it, make themselves guardians
of the whole of experience, seeking a point of view from which
they can appreciate just what each type of experience reveals of the
nature of the world we live in. It is in this spirit, for example, that
he writes: "The religious experience, with its persuasion of imme-
diate contact with the Deity, is as genuinely an experience as is the
laboratory experiment; and possibly it is attested by as many in-
dependent witnesses. Yet such an experience can of course be
blindly accepted no more than any other. Every sort of testimony
must be granted a respectful hearing, but none must be allowed to
elbow out the others. In fact the very nature of our problem
compels this tolerance ; for we have seen that it is the search for a
broader view than any other human discipline directly affords"
(P. 20).
So far (Ch. 1) Sheldon's whole orientation is, in terms of my
initial classification, Bosanquetian. The reader is set to expect a
positive metaphysical construction, rendering in explicit theory the
lessons to be drawn from a synthetic survey of all experience. But
this is precisely what Sheldon does not go on to give him. Instead
he swerves off (Ch. 2) into quite a different enterprise. Right here
is the critical point where his Bradleian heads gets the better of
his Bosanquetian heart. Instead of giving us a philosophy, he in-
vites our attention to the "disease" from which all philosophy
suffers. Why is there so little agreement among philosophers?
Why no funded truth? Why this spectacle of unending strife and
fratricidal contradiction ?
The diagnosis of the cause of this disease is undertaken in eight
chapters in which Sheldon critically examines the main types of
philosophical systems. This part of the book is extraordinarily
well done. Each type is presented by the skilful use of material
drawn from diverse thinkers whose views have the required kinship.
I wish I had time to dwell in detail on some of the many excellencies
of these chapters. Alike for fair and penetrating sympathy in ex-
position and for acuteness in criticism, they seem to me to belong
to the very best work in recent philosophy. I can only mention the
apt use of the theories of Avenarius, Natorp, Miinsterberg, Baldwin ;
the illuminating account of the different neo-realistic tendencies
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 105
(though S. Alexander's version of realism receives, unaccountably,
only an incidental mention) ; the very appreciative account of intui-
tionalism and mysticism ; and, last but not least, the valuable chapter
on Thomism (Ch. 10). There is no other survey of contemporary
philosophical tendencies so masterly within its compass as this of
Sheldon's.
The secret of Sheldon's power of thinking himself into so many
apparently conflicting points of view is that each for him is wholly
true, but beyond a certain critical point utterly barren and un-
profitable. He is thus in a position to squeeze every ounce of
positive significance out of each system, whilst insisting that there
is always a point beyond which its claims to be the whole truth,
and its blind denial of the truth of its rivals, make it infertile.
Thus, for example, "subjectivism" is perfectly correct in its con-
tention that the whole world may be regarded as a phase of some
one's consciousness, but its "critical point," the point of manifest
triviality and barrenness, comes when the reality of unpereeived
objects, e. g., of the percipient's brain, and the distinction between
the real and the imaginary, turn out to be inexplicable in terms of
subjectivist theory. Similarly, "great subjectivism" puts the high-
est value on system in theory, on law and order in practise, and thus
is led to an intolerant denial of the chaotic loose ends in experience,
and of individual initiative and experiment in conduct. But the
objectivist and pragmatic theories, which insist on the truth of what
subjectivisms deny, exhibit themselves the converse intolerance.
Partisanship, resulting in mutual exclusiveness, and due to pushing
a true theory beyond the point of fertility, is the common vice of
all systems which seek to construe the world from a single point of
view. Nor are the deliberately "synthetic" systems the logical or
Hegelian, the aesthetic or Leibnizian, the practical or Thomistic-
Aristotelian less free from this disease of intolerance or one-sided-
ness, in spite of all their claims to cure the trouble by their breadth
and all-inclusiveness. Thus Thomism, for all its amazing subtlety
and wealth of empirical detail leaves us in the end wavering "be-
tween the extremes of dogma without understanding, and reason
without doctrine" (p. 403). Again, absolutism is dogged by
skepticism. The transition from whole to parts and vice versa, or
from reality to appearances and back again, is not mediated or
made intelligible. To proclaim faith in a "somehow" does not
satisfy the desire clearly to see "how." For all that the absolute
is the "most positive concept" ever conceived by man, it is ab-
solutely barren. Yet absolute idealism is "the most honest and the
justest system which professional philosophy has to show" (p. 423).
This judgment shows that Sheldon has come not to destroy but to
fulfil Hegel.
106 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
If, thus, the philosophical disease consists everywhere in pushing
a genuine truth so far that it becomes barren by contradicting a
complementary truth, the remedy most to be desired will be a
positive, "vitalizing" principle, enabling us at one stroke to retain
all these truths; to remove their mutual contradictions; to explain
the actual content of the world ; and to supply guidance for conduct.
Such a principle Sheldon professes to find in the actual char-
acter of the real world, and he holds it to be only our ignoring of
this principle which engenders the strife between externality and
internality, sameness and difference.
It is the principle of internality which says to us at every stage: the fact
that you have named is not final by itself, but must be understood, and the only
way to understand it is to see it in its relations to the other facts. It is the
principle of externality which says at every stage : here is a fact, completely de-
termined, standing on its own feet, which you must believe, independent of its
being explained or not. The internality-axiom drives us ever onward, the exter-
nality-axiom tells us to be satisfied with what is present. The former shows its
power in the real world, in the infinite intertwining at every moment of different
laws, causes, and elements; the latter shows its power in the resultant existence
here and now of finite events and determinate limited things (p. 435).
The play and counter-play of these principles produces the
dialectical strife of which life and theory alike are full. Yet "some-
how the real world itself has harmonized these antagonisms: if it
did not, it would 'be instantly annulled. . . . Reality has solved the
problem; man has not, and so man does not know what reality
properly is" (p. 453). Now, "our thought gets its material from
reality," hence, "the dialectic must be soluble not only in reality
as the Hegelians have taught us, but also in our particular vexed
understandings" (p. 454). Herewith we are brought to the very
threshold of Sheldon's great metaphysical discovery.
The whole root of the trouble lies indeed in the simplest of all things in the
world, namely, a quite arbitrary dictum. Its simplicity lies in its arbitrariness;
the dictum stands alone, ungrounded, unsupported in any way whatsoever. That
sameness and difference exclude each other is the purest dogma, a fulmination
out of the darkness, justified by no utility or self-evidence. Search as we may,
we find no argument offered, in all the long history of thought, to excuse it. ...
We observe in every moment of our waking lives that (two things are the same
while at the same time different. Two oranges are of the same color, yet of dif-
ferent shapes; a particular stone is now in my hand, now flying through the air,
yet the same stone ; you are the same man to-day that you were yesterday in spite
of added experiences. Always we witness the opposite of this dictum, yet men
have felt, or thought they felt, a certain inner compulsion to utter it. Thought
seems to have set up a rule of its own, independent of observation and doing so,
has allowed itself to become divorced from reality (p. 456).
And thus we hold the simple secret in our hands. Let Bertrand
Russell and F. H. Bradley, in the pride of intellect, declare that
identity is identity and difference is difference, and that never can
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 107
the one 'be reconciled with the other. We must become again like
little children and learn once more to behold all around us in the
world how "sameness and difference may co-habit without shame"
(p. 474). Even "the completed infinite" ceases to be self-contra-
dictory. It is the duality, the otherness, at the heart of the union
of these two supposedly hostile principles which is the mainspring
of their fertility for life and thought. It solves all the time-honored
antinomies. "The principle by which we have rid ourselves of ex-
clusion is not an exclusive inclusion, but a free inclusion. Herein
our remedy differs so far as we know toto caelo from any remedy
that has hitherto been proposed, either by partisan or synthetist"
(p. 476).
Here, then, we have the Principle of Productive Duality, the
very principle of free creativeness. Identity and difference, we
learn, though distinct, are not mutually opposed, but rather mutually
contributory. "The two aspects are always of one and the same
reality. They are distinct, yet they are united; they are different,
yet in their difference they display a sameness and a reciprocal con-
formation" (p. 493). Reality comprises all aspects. It is through
and through dual in structure. "It is free and constrained, it is
static and dynamic, it is term and relation, individual and uni-
versal" (ibid.}. The positive relationship of all these aspects
"should elucidate, as none of the synthetic types was able to do,
the transition from one real thing or event to another, show how one
implies another, how event gives rise to event and show it in
concrete; in a word it should reveal the way in which the internality
of relations works" (pp. 493-4). It must be a principle of deduction
which is also a principle of production. It must not only remove
contradictions, but generate novelties. It must furnish a map of
reality showing how its parts are joined. It must enable us to see
how the creative process, once begun, goes on in definite inex-
haustible fertility. It must reveal the necessary connection between
cause and effect. It must enable us to break that virgin soil for
philosophy, the origin of the categories. Reality is an infinite
assemblage of dyads, each having its inner substantial, as well as its
relative adjectival status. Here is a paradigm of productivity :
Suppose the simplest possible dyad: any two things which possess both
sameness and difference. Call them A and B. Then B, being the same as A, must
have the relation to B which A has, to wit, difference. B is therefore different
from B. (This of course does not destroy the identity of B, as sameness and
difference are not mutually destructive.) This second B should be called by a
new name, to distinguish it from the first, viz., C. Now C, being the same with
B, must be, as B is, different from itself hence is implied a new entity D. This
series is indefinitely long. Herein is generated the notion of a class ; for we have
a collection of individuals, all displaying a sameness, while the number of the
collection actually taken is indifferent. It is potentially infinite (p. 509).
108 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
Sheldon's attempts to illustrate his principle 'by empirical in-
stances, e. g., the iceberg floating on the sea, as well as to display
its fertility in application to ethical and political problems, lead to
much interesting, if occasionally fantastic, discussion. That the ills
of the social order are to be cured, not through revolutions, but
through an ''aristocracy of altruists" (p. 519) is a fascinating sug-
gestion. On the other hand, the doctrine that "a mode of conduct
which creates further good conduct ... is the only true, because
the only productive morality" (p. 522). is plausible only so long as
the reader forgets, with Sheldon himself, that by the same token
there is a productive immorality: a mode of conduct which creates
further evil conduct in oneself and others. With a readier faith
the reader will respond to the suggestion that the reform of society
must be built upon the establishment of strong moral individualities,
though he will suspect that Sheldon has learned this, like much other
wisdom, from common human experience, without generating it
from any abstract Principle of Productive Duality.
I have quoted at length in order to enable readers of this review
to judge for themselves the value of Sheldon's theory. In that
Sheldon promises, in further studies, to show in detail how to
deduce the actual world from his general principle, it is perhaps
premature to formulate a verdict. Any demonstration which he
may give will certainly be awaited with interest. Meanwhile, two
impressions are deepened in my mind with every fresh reading,
especially of his last chapter, in which his creative principle is most
fully expounded and its fertility most hopefully proclaimed. One
is, that at present Sheldon has furnished no proof, better than the
manipulations of abstract symbols illustrated in the quotation above,
of the power of his principle to articulate, let alone "to explain,
i. e., logically to generate," the actual universe as we have it here
and now. The other is, that when Sheldon returns to the practical
problem of the diminution of human suffering surely the field
above all others in which we would wish him to exhibit the fertility
of his principle he has, in effect, to confess his failure to deduce
any concrete solution or policy whatever. No doubt this failure is
skilfully covered up by the suggestion that the philosopher can not,
and need not, do more than point out the ideals to be kept in mind,
leaving it to specialist and expert to apply them in detail. Sheldon
even ingeniously declares that this dualism of general principle and
specific application supports his whole position. But that there is a
real failure here, at least in the sense of an implicit withdrawal of
the extravagant hopes and promises of earlier pages, is, I think,
clear from the confession of his Preface :
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 109
Though the knowledge of the creative principle is requisite for an under-
standing of the specific structure of reality, and though it "will explain more of
that structure than the present volume can show, such knowledge is not enough
for the purpose of human thought and practise. Herein lies the negative side of
the above. Another sort of knowledge must be added; it is afforded by the
special sciences and by practical experience. While the human mind remains
liable to mistakes in reasoning and to preconceived opinion, men can operate
successfully with the fundamental principle only after they have empirically as-
certained the details to which it is to apply. Without such acquaintance, the
general rule is as likely to mislead as to enlighten. The particular working of
the rule can not usually be known before the occasion presents itself; and when
i f . does so, we need both an open-minded empiricism and a resolute will to ensure
the desirable application. The rival claims of individual and society, of religion
and science, of dogma and free thought, of discipline and liberty, must indeed be
adjusted by the aid of the first principle can not otherwise be adjusted; but the
adjustment may not be carried through without expert knowledge also of the
conditions in each particular issue (p. iv).
Does not Sheldon here forget that, by his own statement, thought
draws its material from reality? If the Principle of Productive
Duality is really drawn from reality as revealed in human experi-
ence, then somewhere the philosopher must possess that expertness
which, in turn, will make fresh applications possible. Else the
fruitful union of expert knowledge of detail and abstract principle
is still left unmediated, unless by expert knowledge we mean, not
"another sort of knowledge," but precisely the knowledge of the
principle in its concrete embodiments, and not merely in abstract
formulation. It is the divorce of these two sorts of knowledge
which makes Sheldon's principle empty, precisely when, by all his
praises of it, it should be of teeming richness. Sheldon's own rich
mind deceives him concerning the poverty of his principle.
I can not conclude, especially after this criticism, without a
tribute to the vivacity and felicity of Sheldon's style, which,
throughout much technical debate, preserves the wit and flavor of
good talk. Nor must I forget to mention the broad humanity of
his sympathies and the maturity and independence of his judgment.
He is never dfa^zled by mere aggressiveness or cleverness, nor duped
by the latest catch^words. The reader carries away a vivid im-
pression of poise and sanity and scholarship.
In general, Sheldon's book seems to me the most important con-
tribution to metaphysics which has appeared on this side of the
Atlantic since Royce's The World and the Individual.
R. F. ALFRED HOERNLE.
HARVARD UNIVERSITY.
110 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
Employment Psychology. H. C. LINK. New York : The Macmillan
Company. 1919. Pp. 440.
In a preface to the book Professor E. L. Thorndike calls it "im-
portant because it gives an honest, impartial account of the use of
psychological tests under working conditions in a representative
industry." The author "has the great merit of writing as a man
of science assessing his own work, not as an enthusiast eager to
make a market for psychology with business men. ' '
The first part of the book gives a history of the author's experi-
ences in the relatively new field of employment psychology, the
problems that he met, such as the need for analysis of occupations
into measurable units, for tests to measure these units, for the
technique of applying these tests, for adequate checks upon the
value of the tests, and finally for the need of establishing effective
relations among psychologists, industrial leaders and employees.
The author here presents a very conservative account of the results
achieved in the form of correlations between performance in groups
of tests and actual performance in terms of output of work or other
available measure of efficiency. This very necessary check upon the
validity of measuring devices is still ignored by the champions of
many of the widely advertised schemes for vocational selection.
Data are presented for tests of assemblers, clerks, stenographers,
typists, comptometrists, inspectors, machine operators, and appren-
tice tool-makers and machinists.
The scope of psychological tests is shown to have definite limita-
tions as to the type of individual who can be measured. For in-
stance, the tests are inadequate for selecting executives and indus-
trial leaders, and the reasons for this are clearly set forth. The
tests are shown to be limited also as to the characteristics of an
individual that can be measured. They measure specific ability to
do a given kind of work, but success in that work depends upon a
variety of other factors, the so-called moral or character traits, which
can at present be measured only indirectly.
Part II. of the book deals with trade tests, job analysis and the
"vestibule school" as a selecting and training agency. Trade tests
differ from the usual psychological tests in that they are intended
to measure acquired information and skill, rather than native
ability. Their successful use requires the same careful technique,
standardization and checks as the tests of native ability. They make
necessary also a classification and analysis of occupations according
to the fundamental operations involved. When such an analysis
has been made and the tests for ability to perform these funda-
mental operations have been developed, the selection of the man for
the job will be much simplified.
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 111
Part III. discusses the factors which work for and against the
retention of properly selected employees. The importance of the
other conditions of success than specific ability, that is, the moral
qualities, is shown to 'be most adequately measured in terms of out-
put or production. The various methods for keeping records of
individual production are described and sample record cards are
presented. In industries where standards of production are not
feasible from which relative production of the individual may be
determined, the method of "limited impression" is recommended.
It consists in getting periodical estimates independently from two
or more associates, of performance in terms of speed, orderliness,
tact, initiative, etc. "If the work can not be standardized, and if
the estimates of workers must depend upon personal opinions, the
next best step must be taken. This step is to standardize the method
in which personal opinion shall be expressed, and to pursue a course
which shall reduce the chance elements in such expression to a
minimum. ' '
Part IV. contains a brief summary of the manner in which the
material discussed in the book may be put into practise. An in-
teresting chapter presents the point of view of the applicant or
employee, a very necessary consideration in applying any method
for his selection and retention. An appendix contains the tests
mentioned in the text, together with standards and methods of
computing scores.
A. T. POFFENBERGER.
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY.
JOURNALS AND NEW BOOKS
THE PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW. March, 1919. The Per-
sonalistic Conception of Nature (pp. 155-146) : MARY WHITON
CALKINS. - l ' The first division of the paper will attempt accordingly
to trace the metamorphosis of vitalism into personalism and to show
that this psychological vitalism antagonizes no justified claim of
mechanism. The later divisions of the paper will discuss the philo-
sophical nature and the bases of a personalistic cosmology." The
Development of Coleridge's Thought (pp. 147-163) : NORMAN
WILDE. - Coleridge was a constructive critic. His attitude was
largely assimilative and appreciative. It is for this reason impor-
tant to estimate the historical development of his thought. He was a
born Platonist of the mystic type. He is incorrectly labeled a Ger-
man transcendentalist. He belongs rather to the traditional Eng-
lish Platonism of the seventeenth century. Mind, Body, Theism,
112 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
and Immortality (pp. 164-175) : JOSHUA C. GREGORY. - Views body
and mind as two mutually interacting and interdependent entities
bearing the relationship of copartnership. That mind and life de-
veloped out of the non-living does not preclude the possibility of a
career superior for them to that of matter. Descent does not decide
destiny. Evolution is not incompatible with theism or immortality.
Proceedings of the Eighteenth Annual Meeting of the American
Philosophical Association (pp. 176-194) : Consists largely of sum-
maries of articles read. Reviews of Books: Proceedings of the Aris-'
totelian Society, New Series, Volume XVIII., J. E. CREIGHTON.
John Dewey and others, Creative Intelligence, KATHERINE E. GIL-
BERT. Frederick J. Teggart, The Process of History, GEORGE H.
SABINE. Notices of New Books. Summaries of Articles, Notes.
Cunningham, Holly Estil. An Introduction to Philosophy. Boston :
Richard G. Badger. 1920. Pp. 257. $1.75.
Whitehead, A. N. An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Natural
Knowledge. Cambridge, England : University Press. 1919. Pp.
xii -f 200.
NOTES AND NEWS
A meeting of the Aristotelian Society was held on December 15,
Professor A. N. Whitehead in the chair. Dr. G. E. Moore read a
paper on "External and Internal Relations," in which he said that
the most important part of what is meant by those who say that no
relations are purely external, seems to be the proposition that every
relational property belongs necessarily to every term to which it
belongs in part. This proposition is false; the truth being that
some only among relational properties belong necessarily to those
terms which possess them. To say that the property P belongs
necessarily to the subject S is to say that from the proposition, with
regard to any term, A, that it has not got P, it follows that A is
numerically different from S. And this has been falsely taken to be
true of every P and every S, because it is in fact true that from the
proposition "S is P" it follows that any term, A, which has not got
P, is, in fact, other than 8. The proposition that, if p is true, then
the conjunction "q is true and r false" must be false, has been
compared with the proposition that, if p is true, then "q is true
and r false" is necessarily false in the sense that r follows from q.
From the proposition "From ( p is true' it follows that 'q is true
and r false' is false" it does not follow that, if p is true, then r
follows from q.
VOL. XVII. No. 5, FEBRUARY 26, 1920
THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS
CHRISTIANITY AND HISTORY
II. ALLEGORY AND THE CONTRIBUTION OF ORIGEN
IN spite of what has 'been said to the weakness of Christian
historiography, it is possible to take a quite opposite point of
view, and to maintain the thesis that, among religions, Christianity
is especially notable as resting essentially on a historical basis.
In so far as Christianity was a historical religion, that was due,
as has just been said, to the Messianic element in it. Indeed it can
be said to have claimed from the beginning that it was a historical
religion a fulfilment of history, one fitting itself into the scheme
of social and political evolution in a particular state. The apostles
themselves, in their earliest appeal, demanded that one "search the
scriptures" a demand unique in the founding of religions. There
is a vast difference, however, between studying history and study-
ing historically. That they did study it, the one fact that the
Christians retained the old Testament is ample evidence. That
they failed to deal with it adequately, the New Testament is also
ample evidence. But since the Christian Messiah was offered to
the whole world as well as to the Jews, Christian historiography
had two main tasks before it: it had to place the life of Jesus in
the history of the Jews, upon the one hand, and in the general
history of antiquity, upon the other. The latter problem was not
forced upon the church until the pagan world began to take the
new religion seriously, and its answer is found in the works of the
great apologists. The relation of Christianity to Judaism, how-
ever, the Messianic problem proper, was of vital importance from
the beginning, for it involved the supreme question whether or not
Jesus was the one in whom the prophecies were fulfilled. 1
i The coming of the Messiah was the main continuation of Jewish national
history. Messiahship was to the Jews of the time of Christ the embodiment of
somewhat the same thought as stirred the Frenchman of the close of the nine-
teenth century at the recollection of 1870 and the lost provinces, or lent such
inspiration in embittered Poland to the prophet-like poetry of Mickiewicz. It
was the dream of a deliverer, a belief strengthened rather than crushed by fail-
ure and disaster. The whole sad drama of Jewish history may be said to have
113
114 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
One "searched the scriptures" therefore for the evidences of
the signs iby which the advent could be recognized. The invitation
to search them was, in appearance at least, a challenge to a scien-
tific test, that of verification. If the data of the life of Jesus cor-
responded with the details of the promises, there was a proof that
the promises had been fulfilled. But since the fulfilment was not
literal, the interpretation could not be literal either. The spiritual
Kingdom of the Messiah had to be constructed out of fragmentary
and uncertain references, and the only satisfactory w,ay to apply
many of them was by symbolism and allegory. Modern scholar-
ship has now discarded messianic prophecy, having discovered that
the texts so confidently cited as foretelling the life of Jesus had no
such purpose in the minds of their authors. But orthodoxy has
held, through all the history of the church, that the texts were
applicable and that the proof was thereby established of the har-
mony of the old and the new dispensations.
We can not turn, however, to the problems of higher criticism.
The significant thing for history-writing was the creation of what
might be called a new genre that of the allegorical interpretation
of texts. The use of allegory to explain, or explain away, texts
was not a creation of Christian historians, for the device was not
unknown to pagan literature or philosophy. As far back as the
sixth century B.C., Homer was interpreted allegorically by Theagenes
of Rhegium, and pagan philosophy had constant recourse to alle-
gory to harmonize myth with reason. The Jews too were past-
masters in its use; indeed it runs through the prophetic literature
alongside that elusive trace of the unattained which gave the
prophecies their fascinating charm. One could track it back
farther still to the mind of primitive man, where symbol and
reality are often confused into a single impression. But in the
hands of the Christian theologians, symbolism emerged from the
background of thought to dominate the whole situation. The story
of realities depended upon the interpretation of the unrealities;
and that story of realities was nothing short of a history of the
world itself.
Allegorical interpretation of the Old Testament had been devel-
oped by the Jewish scholars, especially those of the diaspora, who
found themselves thrown into contact with gentile scholars and
felt the need of harmonizing Greek thought with their own intel-
lectual heritage. One finds it to the full in the writings of the
greatest Jewish philosopher of antiquity, Philo of Alexandria, who
concentrated its expression in the messianic hope a hope against hope itself.
Christianity in offering itself as the realization of that hope was stepping into
a definite place in Jewish history, but it was a place to which the Jewish nation
as a whole has never admitted it.
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 115
lived at the time of Jesus. The extent to which he carried it may
"be gauged by his description of the Garden of Eden, whose four
rivers became the four virtues, prudence, temperance, courage and
justice, and the central stream from which they flow, the Divine
"Wisdom.- 2
The greatest master of Christian allegory was Origen. While
not a historian in the stricter sense, he contributed to Christian his-
toriography one of its most remarkable chapters. He not only denied
the literal truth of much of Genesis, and explained away the darker
happenings in the history of Israel; but, even in the New Testa-
ment, he treated as parables or fables such stories as that of the
Devil taking Jesus up into a high mountain and showing him the
kingdoms of the world. One reads Origen with a startle of sur-
prise. The most learned of the Fathers of the third century was a
modern. His commentaries upon the bible might almost pass for
the product of the nineteenth century. The age of Lyell and Dar-
win has seen the same effort of mystic orthodoxy to save the poem
of Creation, by making the six days over into geological eras and
the story of Adam and Eve a symbol of human fate. Many a
sermon upon the reconciliation of science and religion that su-
preme subject of modern sermons might be taken almost bodily
from Origen. For his problem was essentially like that which
fronts the modern theologian; he had to win from a rationalism
which he respected, the denial of its inherent skepticism. Like
Philo, a resident of that cosmopolitan center, Alexandria, that
meeting-place of races and religions, Origen was a modern among
moderns. He was a Greek of subtlest intellect and vast erudition,
one of the finest products of the great Hellenic dispersion. 3
Interpretation of the scriptures by allegory is not, in Origen 's
eyes, an unwarranted liberty. The scriptures themselves sanction
it allegorically ! ''There is a hidden and secret meaning," he
says, "in each individual word. The treasure of divine wisdom is
hid in the vulgar and unpolished vessels of words; as the apostle
also points out when he says, 'We have this treasure in earthen
vessels.'" 4 Quaintly naive as such reasoning seems when based
upon a single text, its weakness becomes its strength when sufficient
texts are adduced to convey the impression that the scriptures
themselves do really proclaim their own symbolic character. This
Origen endeavors to do. "If the texts of Moses had contained
nothing which was to be understood as having a secret meaning,
the prophet would not have said in his prayer to God : ' Open thou
*Cf. Allegories of the Sacred Laws, I: 19.
s Cf. Eusebius, Church History, Bk. 6, for details of Origen 's life.
*De Principiis, I., 1: 9.
116 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
mine eyes and I will behold wondrous things out of thy
(Psalms, 119.18).' ' What, he asks, can one make out of the
prophecy of Ezekiel except allegorically ? 5 Prophetic literature im-
plies allegory in its very structure. But the strongest proof of the
legitimacy of allegorical interpretation is its use in the New Testa-
ment, and so largely by St. Paul. 6
The modern critic sees the vicious circle in which such reason-
ing moves. But he sees it 'because he denies the hidden meaning,
the secret lore, which to the "intellectuals" of the third century
was the real heart of phenomena. Symbolism has deeper roots
than one suspects. The mysterious efficacy of numbers is as wide
as savagery ; the secret values of words is a doctrine as universal as
speech. They come from untold ages beyond Pythagoras or Hera-
cleitus. The Christian emphasis upon the logos "the word which
became God and the word which was God" but put the stamp of
supreme authority upon a phase of thought intelligible to all antiq-
uity. Gnosticism took hold of that phase, and !by insisting upon
an inner doctrine which was concealed from the uninitiated, at-
tempted to harmonize Christianity with the parallel cults of pagan-
ism. Neo-platonism was doing much the same for paganism itself.
The cults of Asia and Egypt were drawn together and interpreted
in the light of the worship of Demeter or Dionysus. Origen's point
of view is not so naive as it seems. It was in line with that of his
age. The world was a growing one, and yet the world itself was
a medley of different civilizations. The only way the ancient could
think of overcoming this antithesis between an ideal which unified
and phenomena which differed was by denying the essential nature
of the differences. We should do the same if it were not for our
hypothesis of evolution and the historical attitude of mind. Only
when one sees the impasse into which the thinkers of antiquity were
forced, in their attempts to syncretize a complex and varying
world, does one realize by contrast what a tremendous implement
of synthesis the evolutionary hypothesis supplies. The only alter-
native method by which to realize the harmony which does not
appear is by symbolism.
If we once grant that texts are not what they seem, there is only
one way to learn their true meaning. We must find a key, and
that key must be some supreme fact, something so large that the
content of the text seems but incidental to it. Christianity sup-
plied such a clue to the interpretation of the Old Testament; and
the Old Testament, upon its side, supplied Christianity with the
authority of a long antiquity. The value of that antiquity for the
basis of a story of obscure, recent happenings in Jerusalem was
s Against Celsus, 4: 50.
eOp. tit., 4: 49.
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 117
felt by all apologists, and has been a convincing argument until the
present. It was left for the nineteenth century to substitute for
symbolism the tests of historical criticism, and thus to see the whole
scheme of theological interpretation fade away. But we should not
forget that, false as it seems to us in both method and results, the
symbolic method made the theologian somewhat of a historian in
spite of himself; and we should not expect of the savants of the
third century the historical and evolutionary attitude of to-day
which was, so far as we can see, his only alternative.
Symbolism may twist the texts; but a mind like Origen's does
not miss the essential point that the texts must be there to twist.
Nothing is more interesting in the historiography of early Chris-
tianity than to see how Origen came to realize, after all, the paucity
of his sources and their inadequacy, particularly those dealing with
the history of Christianity itself. He shows this with scholarly
frankness in a passage in his famous apology Against Celsus.
Celsus was a pagan Greek who wrote the most notable attack upon
Christianity of which we have record from those early times. His
treatise was a powerful and learned criticism of the Christian
writings and teachings, especially emphasizing their unscientific
character and the credulity of those who believed in them. Origen's
reply reveals in more places than one how in him a genuine his-
torical critic was lost in the theologian. To illustrate: Celsus had
claimed that before writing his attack he had taken the trouble to
acquaint himself with all the Christian doctrines and writings.
Origen, drawing on his prodigious knowledge of the bible, shows
time and again what a superficial acquaintance it had been that is,
judged according to Origen's 1 method of interpretation. But when
Celsus charges the Christians with obscurantism, stating that their
teachers generally tell him ' ' Do not investigate, ' ' while at the same
time exhorting him to believe, Origen takes another tack. 7 He is
apparently a little ashamed of the emphasis taken from reason and
placed upon faith by his Christian colleagues. He does not actually
say as much, but he reminds Celsus that all men have not the
leisure to investigate. After this weak admission, however, he turns
round, in what is one of the most interesting passages of patristic
writing, and demands if Celsus and the pagans do not follow au-
thority as well. Have not Stoics and Platonists a teacher too,
whose word they go back to? Celsus believes in an uncreated
world and that the flood (Deucalion's) is a fairly modern thing. 8
* Cf. I., 12 and 10. The order of citations has been reversed here for
clarity.
8 Celsus also had the idea of a common evolution of ideas and customs and
of the borrowings of one nation from another, e. g., circumcision from
Egypt (1: 22).
118 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
But what authority has he? The dialogues of Plato? But Moses
saw more clearly than Plato. He was in incomparably better
position to be informed. Why not prefer the account of Moses?
The value of a controversy is that each side sees the other 's weak
points. It seldom results in admitting the inferiority of your own
position ; but once in a while a fair-minded man will be courageous
enough to state that, through no fault of his own, he is unable to
be more accurate than his opponent. This is about what Origen
does, in taking up the charge of Celsus that the narrative of the
baptism in the Jordan is so improbable a story as to require con-
firmation of first-hand witnesses, before he as a thinking pagan
could accept it. In reply Origin frankly admits the paucity of
sources for the history of Christianity; but demands to know if
Celsus is willing to give up pagan history because it contains im-
probable incidents. The passage is worth quoting, for it shows how
the most learned man of all the Fathers, the most subtle and compre-
hensive intellect, with one exception, which Christianity enlisted
to its cause, recognized the weakness of Christian historiography
but failed to see how it could be remedied.
Before we begin our reply we have to remark that the endeavor to show,
with regard to almost any history, however true, that it actually occurred, and
to produce an intelligent conception regarding it, is one of the most difficult
undertakings that can be attempted, and is in some instances an impossibility.
For suppose that some one were to assert that there never had been any Trojan
War, chiefly on account of the impossible narrative interwoven therewith, about
a certain Achilles being -the son of a sea-goddess Thetis and of a man Peleus,
or Sarpedon being the son of Zeus, or Aseulapius and lalmenus the sons of Ares,
or ^Eneas that of Aphrodite, how should we prove that such was the case, espe-
cially under the weight of the fiction attached, I know not how, to the univer-
sally prevalent opinion that there was really a war in Ilium between Greeks and
Trojans? And suppose, also that some one disbelieved the story of (Edipus and
Joeasta, and of their two sons Eteocles and Polynices, because the sphinx, a kind
of half -virgin, was introduced into the narrative, how should we demonstrate the
reality of such a thing? And in like manner also with the history of the Epi-
goni, although there is no such marvellous event interwoven with it, or with the
return of the Heracleidffl, or countless other historical events. But he who deals
candidly with thistories, and would wish to keep himself also from being imposed
upon by them, will exercise his judgment as to what statements he will give his
assent to, and what he will accept figuratively, seeking to discover the meaning
of the authors of such inventions, and from what statements he will withhold his
belief, as having been written for the gratification of certain individuals.
And we have said this by way of anticipation respecting the whole history
related in the Gospels concerning Jesus, not as inviting men of acuteness to a
simple and unreasoning faith, but wishing to show that there is need of candor
in those who are to read, and of much investigation, and, so to speak, of insight
into the meaning of the writers, that the object with which each event has been
recorded may be discovered.
In so many words Origen admits that since the sources for
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 119
Christian history can not .be checked up by external evidence, there
is nothing left but to accept their main outlines on faith the same
faith the Greek has in the existence of Troy or the Roman in the
early kings. But being a Greek and above all a Greek in argu-
ment he qualifies his faith by reason and explains away what
seems improbable. In a way, therefore, we have before us a sort
of sophisticated Herodotus after all, who eliminates myth to suit
his perspective.
Had the Christian world been and remained as sophisticated as
Origen, the conception of biblical history for the next fifteen hun-
dred years would have been vastly different. But, although the
allegorical method of biblical interpretation was used by nearly
all the Fathers by none more than by the pope whose influence
sank deepest into the Middle Ages, Gregory the Great and still
forms the subject of nearly all sermons, the symbolism and allegory
came to be applied less to those passages which contained the narra-
tive, than to the moralizing and prophetic sections. The stories of
the creation, of the flood, of Joseph, of the plagues in Egypt, of
Sodom and Gomorrah, were not explained away. But about them,
and the rest of that high theme of the fortunes of Israel, were woven
the gorgeous dreams of every poetic imagination, from Origen to Bos-
suet, which had been steeped in miracle and rested upon authority.
One turns to Sulpicius Severus, the biographer of the wonder-
working Martin of Tours, for the bible story as it reached the
Middle Ages. The narrative of the Old Testament was taken
literally, like that of the New; the story of a primitive people was
presented to a primitive audience. Allegory was not allowed to
explain away passages which would have shocked the critical intelli-
gence of Hellenic philosophers, for those were the very passages
most likely to impress the simple-minded Germans for whose edu-
cation the church itself was to be responsible.
There was, however, a better reason than mere credulous
simplicity, why Jewish and Christian history were not allegorized
away. It was because that history had been made credible by an
exhaustive treatment of chronology. Christian scholars took up the
task of reconciling the events of Jewish history with the annals of
other histories, and worked into a convincing and definite scheme of
parallel chronology the narrative from Abraham to Christ. Mathe-
matics was applied to history not simply to the biblical narrative
but all that of the ancient world and out of the chaos of fact and
legend, of contradiction and absurdity, of fancy run riot and un-
founded speculation, there was slowly hammered into shape that
scheme of measured years back to the origins of Israel and then
to the creation, which still largely prevails to-day. This is one of
120 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
the most important things ever done by historians. Henceforth,
for the next fifteen centuries and more, there was one sure path
back to the origin of the world, a path along the Jewish past, and
marked out by the absolute laws of mathematics and revelation.
An account of how this came about will carry us back into that
complicated problem of the measurement of time, which we have
considered before, in its general aspects. Now, however, we come
upon the work of those who gave us our own time-reckoning, and
who in doing so molded the conception of world history for the
western world more than any other students or masters of history.
JAMES T. SHOTWELL.
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY.
(To be concluded.)
A THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE WHICH FOEEGOES META-
PHYSICS. IN REPLY TO DR. SCHILLER
rpHERE are whole ranges of man's effort toward intelligent in-
-L sight which, even in our day, are rendered taboo by the sign
and bugbear Speculation. The advance in the sciences during
recent decades has done much, it is true, to hearten and reassure the
timid that the implied curse is not so fearsome. The mathematician
leading the way, and physics, chemistry, biology following, have
transformed the unapproachable place into a veritable treasure-
house of their offerings. Even the Gradgrind type of Empiricist
is no longer taken aback by supersensuous biophors, transcendental
functions, or symmetrical points in muscles. But this resolving of
the taboo is to be noted chiefly on one avenue of approach to the
dreaded Metaphysic. It is recognized that the outcome of empirical
investigation is usually metaphysical entities and supersensuous
relations such as electrons, a perfectly elastic medium, or the rela-
tion called heredity. The fact that more mathematics can be used
in dealing with certain phenomena than in those of recurrent and
age-weary problems is not one to blind the modern physicist or
biologist to the character of his conclusions, as frankly a projection
of scientific imagination in accord with available data.
But is it less frequently recognized that the general assumptions
and methods employed in any investigation are themselves hypotheses
which also determine the resultant interpretation. Even the simple-
minded would, it is true, realize that the method which admits two
and only two terms (say matter and motion) presupposes that other
assumed entities can be reduced to these terms. A method which
interprets chemical qualities as groupings of "constituent" atoms or
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 121
electrons assumes that spatial relationships are functions of molec-
ular structure. The psychologist who interprets mental phenomena
in terms of the theory of biological survival not only construes
human mental processes in terms of physiology; historically he has
shown himself scornful, if not oblivious, of the mental processes
called philosophical problems. Whether we start with simple belief
in "hard sensations" (Bertrand Russell), and depend upon the
mathematical postulates of Euclid or of Einstein, our process of
thought will be a priori in the sense of committing ourselves for the
time being to a whole system of interpretations. And that is why
every possible assumption is so important to the open-minded in-
vestigator.
Now the tracing of implications in any given method is not
necessarily a judgment concerning its validity. It may be called
an effort to "save appearances," to avoid dogmatic suppression, it
may be to use that method more intelligently. Should an inherent
absurdity, a logical contradiction, or a group of data unaccounted
for, be made known to such an investigator he would hardly proceed
to a personal charge, much less declare your data irrelevant and
your conclusions errors because you did not use his method and
start with his assumptions! To do so would imply a dogmatism
comporting with omniscience in special revelation.
The present writer, in a paper entitled "A Medieval Aspect of
Pragmatism" 1 endeavored to set forth certain implications of the
familiar doctrine that in any interpretation the mark of validity is
a certain definable ethical quality in its product. It was an effort
to determine what would result logically if such a method were co-
ordinated with another more commonly recognized assumption which
maintains that in the act of knowing things they are assumed to
bear definite relationships to our mental processes. It was argued
that in case we accept both assumptions we assert a functional rela-
tionship between the things known and the ethical quality of the
knowledge process. This conclusion was characterized as an infer-
ence resulting from the hypothetical postulation of both principles.
It aimed for the kind of logical adequacy represented in Euclidian
demonstration, the premises having been assumed.
Now in a paper entitled "Methodological Teleology" 2 Dr.
Schiller of Oxford "repudiates ... all Professor Warbeke's pre-
suppositions and contentions as a brood of misconceptions hatched
out of a mare's nest" (p. 550). Pragmatism makes no assumptions
whatsoever. It need not burden itself with anything supposed to
be existent, with relationships between mental states and the things
1 This JOURNAL, Vol. XVI., No. 8.
2 This JOURNAL, Vol. XVI., No. 20.
122 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
they are supposed to cognize, or with the qualitative characters of
mental processes which are said to be cognitive. A method as such
is not a dogma; a theory of knowledge is not metaphysic. If any-
one presumes to maintain that pragmatism is a theory of relation-
ships between mental processes and things known, or that these
mental states have recognizable character, he "presupposes an un-
pragmatic logic and an unpragmatic metaphysic." The inferences
drawn are stigmatized as a "worship of Euclidian proof," and the
outcome of a naive metaphysic ' * which imagines that absolute knowl-
edge of reality can be taken for granted" (549).
The present writer will gladly submit to the reader's judgment
the question of whether he "takes absolute truth for granted," or
regards hypotheses as dogmas. He may be said to trust somewhat
hopefully in the process of inference. He still believes that, granted
certain postulates, the demonstrations of Euclid successfully set
forth the implications of his method. He also believes that the
Euclidian method would be xanaititovTa. nod (raOpus idpvptvov if it were
to forego all axioms and postulates. He for one is reasonably sure
that until absolute axioms are discovered, every investigation will,
implicitly or explicitly, involve a nest of speculative assumptions,
and that if these be examined with sufficient penetration they will
be seen to take the form of metaphysical principles. He proposes
now as an example in point to consider the paper of Dr. Schiller
itself.
Pragmatism, says our author, is a method and involves no meta-
physical hypotheses. It foregoes any assumption that there are
definite relationships between mental states and their objects, or
that these objects have relationships among themselves, or that a
causal relation anywhere obtains, or that any quality can be ascribed
to mental processes of the "truth-making" order, or "that there
is a universe, i. e., that we can handle what we believe to be the real
by applying this notion to it" (550). And so "it is evident that
nothing metaphysical is implied in the pragmatist's interpretation
of either action upon or judgment about reality" (551).
Now it may be that Dr. Schiller understands by metaphysics
something other than a systematic effort to coordinate our most gen-
eral assumptions into logical coherence. But even apart from the
question of what we conceive metaphysics to be, the catalogue of
assumptions which Dr. Schiller forthwith proceeds to make has inde-
pendent interest. The present writer will not presume to say
whether the term metaphysical appropriately characterizes a "teleo-
logical constitution which is inevitable in any view of the world"
(551). Or whether it be metaphysical to set up the principle:
"For the mind to know the world it has to be presupposed that the
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 123
two are to some extent and in some sense commensurable" (551).
Or again: "The difference between teleological and causal explana-
tion is not one of principle. Both are ex analogia hominis." Or
again: "If there is any commensurability, however slight, knowl-
edge is possible and attainable in varying degrees." Again: "If
the mind works teleologically ... we shall find the world most
knowable if it is assumed to work similarly" (551). These are all
of them "methodological" but they also have the form and sub-
stance (albeit without the closely reasoned concatenation and weigh-
ing of evidence) of matter to be found in a Bradley or a Koyce.
"Why should it [Pragmatism] scruple to make a postulate which is
universal and legitimate?" inquires our author. And the fact, of
course, is that many such are made. The chief difficulty with non-
pragmatists is to realize how certain assumptions which are avowedly
contradictory can do service at the same time and under the same
conditions. 3
3 In this connection self-defense calls for a statement concerning the law of
contradiction. Dr. Schiller, vexed by the "superficiality" of references neces-
sarily brief in a short article, repudiates these references as "inaccurate."
"Professor Warbeke . . . attributes to me a demand for the 'abrogation 7 of
the law of contradiction which actually occurs in an exposition of Hegel ! ' '
(505). The only answer under these circumstances would seem to be to quote
more in extenso passages in the Formal Logic discussed under the head:
"Contradiction as a Principle of Being, Either Meaningless or False; as a
Principle of Thought, Self -contradictory. " "Because all things change, they
not only fail to preserve their identity, but also succeed in assuming contra-
dictory attributes. Consequently the maxim that a thing can not be and not be
A will only hold in cases where the thing has not changed since it was A. If it
[Formal Logic] frankly admitted into its statement of the principle all the
qualifications which may be relevant in its actual use, it would cease to have
any impressiveness or meaning in the abstract. We should have to say, e. g.,
'A can not be A and not-,4 at the same time, in the same place, in the same re-
spect, in the same reference, in the same context, for the same persons in short,
under precisely the same circumstances; but probably such an ideal case never
occurs and for heaven's sake don't ask me how little difference in any one of
these respects may enable A to be not--4.' Yet it is clear that any such differ-
ences may vitiate an attempted application of the principle. The exact point at
which a dog that eats bones will, from sheer repletion, refuse to eat another
may baffle not only a formal logician but the best canine psychologist. . . .
Clearly, therefore, the principle of Contradiction must not be used to dogmatize
about reality, and the more it is kept out of metaphysics the better for both
parties. (2) Regarded as a principle of thought, it defines the difference be-
tween affirmation and denial. Now it is an important fact, of a psychological
sort, that affirmation and denial (in a sense) exclude each other. But it does
not follow from this that verbally contradictory forms of affirmation and denial
are incompatible. For we can never take it for granted that these forms ex-
press the real meaning of the judgments. . . . Even, however, where the two
contradictory propositions were intended in their literal meaning, we saw that
124 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
The question of what is meant by good is very significant for
one who writes on "The Ethical Basis of Metaphysics." In that
Essay Dr. Schiller says: "Inasmuch as ... teleological valuation
is also the special sphere of ethical enquiry, Pragmatism may be
said to assign metaphysical validity to the typical method of ethics.
At a blow it awards to the ethical conception of Good supreme au-
thority over the logical conception of True and the metaphysical
conception of Real. For from the pursuit of the latter we may
never eliminate the reference to the former. Our apprehension of
the Real, our comprehension of the True, is always effected by beings
who are aiming at the attainment of some Good, and it seems a
palpable absurdity to deny that this fact makes a stupendous differ-
ence." In his criticism of my paper presumably the same author
writes: "It is a further mistake of Professor Warbeke's to ascribe
a metaphysical intention to the doctrine of the connection between
the Real, the True and the Good, and of the supremacy of the Good.
For that too is not a dogma" (552, italics added). How the sen-
tence which follows : ' ' The meaning intended . . . was concerned
with the priority of the epistemological question over the ontolog-
ical" (with which assumption the present writer is in complete
accord) modifies in any way the hypothesis of an "ethical basis for
metaphysics" remains a psychological riddle of the Sphinx.
To define good as the "physical well-being of humans" would
indeed be protoplasmic in its crudity. And Dr. Schiller renders
doubtful honor to the present writer in referring to the proposition :
"The drama of creation is assumed to play about the moral char-
acter, mental attitudes, or physical well-being of humans," as fol-
lows : * * Professor W. writes throughout as if good could mean noth-
ing but the physical well-being of humans" (553). But the latter
too is quite aware of the Platonic use of &ya66v as connoting what
the result would not be two contradictory meanings but no meaning at all, just
because there is a contradiction. Moreover ... in the very act of affirming the
identity of A we are defining it over against not-^ and excluding not-,4 from
it. Thus every assertion includes a denial, omnis determinatio est negatio. . , .
Thus to affirm is at the same time to deny, and to deny to affirm; the very law
of Contradiction seems to demand its own abrogation. The paradox of the
situation is well calculated to provoke that philosophic stupor which appears to
be the end of philosophy as commonly understood, and Hegel had the wits to
exploit it. But though he was extensively accused of denying the Law of
Contradiction, his argument was not refuted. Still he did not propound a prin-
ciple that should be both applicable and undeniable, and nothing less than this
can content Formal Logic" (pp. 121-123).
To what extent the above is to be regarded as an ft exposition of Hegel"
and in what sense "Contradiction as a principle of thought is self -contradic-
tory" thus appears to be a question of significant assertion when "All things
[including minds] change." Gorgian Skepticism seems here at the door.
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 125
one would rather be or have or do than anything else. And while
he conceives philosophy to have relationships to desired ends, includ-
ing honorable relations among philosophers, he is endeavoring, even
by pragmatic methods to discover what form of good is demonstrably
the criterion of scientific and philosophical truth. The answer to
this question might be of value to pragmatism itself as well as to
those who ''babble ... in Cloudcuckoodom " (553) even though
it only make the latter resolve that silence is best.
JOHN M. WARBEKE.
MT. HOLYOKE COLLEGE.
SOCIETIES
THE TWENTY-EIGHTH ANNUAL MEETING OF THE
AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION
ABOUT one hundred and twenty-five psychologists assembled at
Harvard University for the twenty-eighth annual meeting of
the American Psychological Association on December 29, 30 and 31.
The programme for Monday included a session for general psy-
chology, an exhibit of new apparatus and teaching materials, a session
for experimental psychology and one for intelligence tests. On
Tuesday the psychologists met jointly in the morning with the
American Association of Clinical Psychologists and in the afternoon
with the American Anthropological Association; the evening being
the occasion of the annual dinner and the address of the retiring
President, Professor Walter Dill Scott, of Northwestern University.
Following the close of the meetings Wednesday noon, many guests
visited the Massachusetts State School for Feeble-Minded, the Judge
Baker Foundation, the Carnegie Nutrition Laboratory, McLean
Hospital, the Psychopathic Hospital and other institutions in the
vicinity.
The programme gave 6 titles under general psychology, experi-
mental psychology 16, intelligence tests and clinical psychology 21,
comparative psychology 2, social and religious psychology 3, and
applied psychology 7. The greatest interest seemed to center in the
sessions for intelligence tests, clinical psychology and the work of
psychologists in the service of the war and industries. Among the
best contributions of the meetings were the results of work of psy-
chologists in various phases of war activities. The pronounced
development of the technique of trade-testing, the thorough tryout
of intelligence tests by their use on more than a million and a half
recruits, with subsequent revision of older notions of median mental
levels of unselected as well as psychoneurotic, foreign-born, colored
126 TEE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
and other individuals, the need of tests other than those of general
intelligence for diagnosis of psychoneurotics, and vocational apti-
tudes and the need of systematic training and classification of
workers in the rapidly growing field of clinical psychology, may be
considered the main features of the meetings. That interest is not
diminishing in the work in laboratory and experimental psychology
on more general topics, was evidenced by the total of 16 papers in
these fields.
During the annual business meeting, held Tuesday afternoon,
Shepherd I. Franz, Government Hospital for the Insane, Washing-
ton, D. C., was elected President of the Association for the coming
year; Edward G. Boring, Clark University, Secretary-Treasurer;
H. S. Langfeld, Harvard University, and M. V. Bingham, Carnegie
Institute of Technology, were elected to the Council. Chicago was
selected for the convention in December, 1920. Twenty-seven new
members were voted into the association and the deaths, during the
year, of John Wallace Baird, Edward Cowles, and August Hoch
were reported.
H. S. Langfeld, of Harvard University, reported information just
received concerning the work of psychologists in the German army.
Tests were devised and applied for the selection of motormen, motor-
vehicle drivers, aviators, and for skilled labor in many industries.
Apparently but few new methods of selecting men on the basis of
innate ability were developed and in the field of trade-testing and
in measurements of general intelligence, the work of psychologists in
Germany fell short of the accomplishments of psychologists in
America.
On the afternoon of Tuesday the Association met jointly with
the American Anthropological Association at which time Clark
Wissler, American Museum of Natural History, representing the
anthropologists, and W. V. Bingham, Carnegie Institute, represent-
ing the psychologists, urged a closer coordination and cooperation of
the work in the two fields of science. Dr. Wissler pointed out the
differences in the equipment and approach of psychologist and an-
thropologist, the advantages that would result from a combined
attack in many cases, and the eagerness of workers in his field to
cooperate in the solution of social and industrial problems. Dr.
Bingham indicated the practical advantages of a division of anthro-
pology and psychology, enabling at least an annual interchange of
opinions and practises. A paper prepared by J. R. Angell, Uni-
versity of Chicago, was read in which both groups of workers were
urged to cooperate with the National Research Council in the con-
duct of investigation.
The retiring President, Walter Dill Scott, Northwestern Univer-
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 127
sity, addressed the Association on the subject Changes in Some of Our
Conceptions and Practises in Personnel on the evening of the annual
dinner. Evolution along five lines was emphasized: (1) A history
was given of changes in the concept of the amount and nature of indi-
vidual differences from the older belief that peoples were originally
much alike and that such differences as appeared were due to en-
vironmental factors, to the present belief that individuals differ enor-
mously in all traits and that such differences are largely innate.
* ' The greatest achievement of the Association has been the establish-
ment of the fact of individual differences and its applications to
education, politics, industry and economics."
(2) The importance of reasoning as a factor in adjustment has
been superseded by the considerations of instincts, emotions and
habits. The operation of instinctive trends as the spring of action
and the sources of discontent in industrial life was illustrated by
concrete cases. It is not the violation of the workers' logical pro-
cesses that brings unrest and discontent so much as thwartings of
his pride, his desire of social approval, of mastery his instinctive
and emotional trends.
(3) Education in the schools or in the factory must take into
account the unlearned forms of reaction to features of the environ-
ment and seek to so order the individual and his environment that
the desirable adjustments may be made. The work of the personnel
director in industry must be enlarged and his function must be that
of providing the approved experiences so that desirable habits of
response will be built up. Mere richness of content or training of
general faculties will not suffice.
(4) Changes have taken place in the concept of man and his
environment. A man is not the victim of his environment, he is not
the master of it, nor is his function that of subduing or opposing it.
The two should evolve together. In industry, the man -and his job
are not opposed, nor does the concept of selecting the man to fit the
job finding a square peg for a square hole adequately express the
present point of view. The function of the personnel manager is
the "creation of the worker in a working situation." The work
must be arranged to satisfy the human wants of the worker and he
should be set to the task most in harmony with his particular talents
and interests. There must be a correlated improvement of the work
and the workers.
(5) The last point led to a survey of the evolution of vocational
guidance from the chance methods of superstition, guess and in-
cidental inclinations to the modern technique of mental, physical
and vocational tests, statistical methods and the like. "In the last
century the productivity of the worker has been doubled by the
128 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
activities of some 2,000 minds through changes in the material
world. In. the present century equally great increases in produc-
tivity may 'be expected through the adjustment of worker to the
work."
Following are brief summaries of papers presented in the
various sessions:
Session for General Psychology
G. V. N. Dearborn, of the Sargent School of Boston, described
cases of correlation between arterial blood pressure and certain
states of mind. Arterial blood pressure, under control of the
autonomic nervous system, is but slightly susceptible to voluntary
control but decidedly affected by perceptual or ideational influences
provoking emotional reactions. As one aspect of such reactions,
arterial blood pressure may sometimes fall as much as 35 mm. during
a shift from marked anxiety to calm in the course of 15 minutes. A
prescription for "relaxation" which the speaker identified with
diminished activity of the autonomic system calls for "pleasant
thoughts of non-exciting sort" or "making the mind a blank."
A Behavioristic Interpretation of Concepts was offered by B. C.
Givler, of Tufts College. Concepts are "written or spoken words
whose meaning is a motor attitude, attunement or set" which occurs
as a response to them. The theory, similar in many respects to that
of Professor Washburn, makes of meaning a more or less incom-
plete reaction of eye, hand, articulatory or autonomic muscles. A
percept is an acquired motor reaction thinking is a flow of neuro-
miiscular-tension attitudes which "normally eventuate in some overt
reaction" or a "rehearsal or reiteration of action."
A graphic representation of the tonal series from lowest to highest
audibility, indicating the volumic spread of the base line, with
ordinates for pitch-brightness and intensity was shown by R. M.
Ogden, of Cornell University. Evidence was presented indicating
brightness to be an independent variable as well as pitch, intensity
and volume.
B. G. Boring, of Clark University, offered several cautions con-
cerning the uncritical acceptance of the distribution of mental
traits according to the normal probability curve. The form of the
distribution depends, for one thing, upon the unit of measurement
adopted. If the normal law, moreover, is the law of chance, then
two mutually dependent variables for which the relationship is not
simply linear such as height and volume, which varies roughly as
its cube can not have the same form of chance distribution. If the
distribution for height is normal, the distribution for volume can
not be.
In a paper entitled Are there any Instincts? Knight Dunlap, of
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 129
Johns Hopkins, criticized looseness of classification of instincts on
teleological grounds as confusing and often misleading. We should
speak of " instinctive activities" defining the situations and re-
sponses as well as may be and discard, except under necessity, such
complex groupings as "maternal instinct" or " fighting instinct"
and the like. Instances of the same instinctive activities being
listed under several ' * instincts ' ' by the same author were cited.
Sessions for Experimental Psychology
E. S. Robinson, of Yale University, found in three experiments
that decided retroactive inhibition of recall occurred when material
similar to that originally learned is studied immediately after.
Little or no retroactive inhibition was found when the interpolated
study involved dissimilar material. The influence of competition
produced by the subject keeping his own score in the case of motor
reactions to sound or light is to keep the tonicity of specific groups
of muscles (finger-eye-ear accommodation) at a higher level and to
reduce efficiency in scoring results, according to experiments con-
ducted by A. P. Weiss, Ohio State University.
That the rational element in belief has been much over-estimated
appears from experiments reported by A. A. Roback, of Harvard
University. In judging passages, given anonymously, from such
writers as St. Anselm, St. Thomas Aquinas, Neitzsche, Swedenborg
and others as (a) absurd, (6) credible, (c) acceptable, (d) con-
vincing, the congruity of imagery induced by the passage with
memories of similar situations, plus emotional responses and mus-
cular sets, seems fundamental. Acceptance is characterized by "a
tingling in the chest and feeling of w^ell being"; rejection by tense-
ness, contraction of muscles in throat and chest, checking of
respiration and other kinaesthesis. Repeated reading of a passage
generally serves to modify the original attitude in the opposite
direction, convincing passages shifting to doubt, absurd passages
becoming more credible.
F. A. C. Perrin, of the University of Texas, reported upon a
variety of tests of motor ability, involving simple and complex re-
actions. A complex motor ability can not be readily explained as a
simple compound of such specific functions as accuracy, rhythm, and
speed. The nervous mechanisms involved in ambidexterity and fine
coordinations resist analysis at present. The correlations between
university grades, mental tests and estimated "character" and suc-
cess in motor abilities were low. Emotional disturbances and atti-
tudes feeling of inferiority, self-consciousness produce marked
changes in performances in such motor functions.
The prevalent belief that our judgments in the fields of apprecia-
tion of music or literature as well as in morals are considerably in-
130 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
fluenced by the contrary opinions of the majority or of experts in
these field is supported by experimental data obtained from college
students by H. T. Moore, of Dartmouth College. Comparisons with
control groups yield results showing that the knowledge of contrary
opinions of the expert or the majority produces reversals of individ-
ual opinions in matter of speech amounting to 4 or 5 times mere
chance. Moral reversals under majority influence are 4.7 times
chance, whereas reversals of musical preferences as a result of ex-
pert or majority opinions is about twice chance.
Circulatory changes in the arm as the result of mental or phys-
ical work were studied by John E. Anderson, of Yale University, by
means of a Lehmann arm plethysmograph. Physical work for a one-
minute period is accompanied by vaso-dilatation in 47 to 74 per cent,
of the cases, followed usually by a continuous tendency toward con-
striction when work is continued for an hour. Mental work count-
ing, reading, adding, etc. shows vaso-dilatation in the arm in ap-
proximately 75 per cent, of the cases. The volume variation is
decidedly individualistic and constant for the same subject in re-
peated tests.
Using a new form of substitution test (nonsense material to be
transliterated into ciphers), H. M. Johnson and Franklin C. Pashal,
of the U. S. Air Service Medical Research Laboratory, found a
definite tendency toward negative acceleration of improvement when
the oxygen supply became "moderately" low. Individual differ-
ences occurred, but in general a marked loss of speed and accuracy
or both appears, accompanied by increased effort, on occasions, to
compensate for obviously diminished performance. The curve of
learning shows frequent spurts until a certain minimum of oxygen
supply brings a breakdown.
C. E. Seashore, University of Iowa, demonstrated the localization
of sound by wave phase in open-air conduction. Certain laws of the
movement of this phantom sound with reference to synchronism,
distance, pitch, intensity, timbre and direction of the two courses
were presented together with a wave phase localization interpreted
in terms of intensity.
The Influence of Expectation on Supraliminal Discrimination of
Sounds was the subject of a paper 'by L. R. Geisler, of Clark Uni-
versity. The intensity or extent of a variable stimulus is the more
erroneously judged the more it differs from the expected standard.
The tendencies to err are always in the direction of the expected
standard. The errors are greater when the expected standards are
presented to the sense, than when they are merely in the form of
recall of a standard presented previously. The explanation sug-
gested is that errors are due to definite muscular sets involved in the
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 131
expectant attitude which interferes with the proper neuro-muscular
readiness to receive the new stimulus. Samuel W. Fernberger, of
Clark University, also reported upon an experiment designed to
test expectation, in the case of lifted weights. In one series of tests
the central stimuli (96 and 100 grams) immediately followed the
heaviest stimulus (104 grams) ; in a second series, the central
stimuli followed the lightest stimulus (88 grams). There appeared
a constant tendency to judge the critical stimuli (96 and 100 grams)
lighter when they followed the 104 gram weight and heavier when
they followed the 88 gram weight. Practise served to increase
rather than decrease such errors of expectation.
L. T. Troland, of Harvard University, found that when a spot
of light of appropriate area is thrown upon the retina in the general
region of the yellow spot, bands of luminosity can often be seen
which connect the stimulus spot with the vicinity of the blind spot.
A study of the course of these bands for different shapes and loca-
tions of the stimulus spot, in comparison with the histology of the
nerve fiber layer of the retina indicates that they are due to second-
ary stimulation of retinal fibers by the impulses passing along
adjacent fibers.
That the determinants of the optimum intensity of light for
ordinary work should be made by monentary exposures of visual
stimuli rather than by prolonged (say a 3 second) observation ap-
peared from experiments reported by P. W. Cobb, Captain M. C.
Medical Research Laboratory, Mitchell Field, L. I. The eye in
ordinary work functions in series of momentary fixation pauses, and
tests of visual acuity should conform to such habits. It was sug-
gested that eye fatigue under unfavorable distributions of light
might be due to disturbances in habits of fixation rhythms owing to
a slowing of the retinal responses, paralleling the effort attending
the attempt to adjust one's walking movements to a step much
different in length or frequency from the customary one.
In response to the need for a rapid test to select men for lookout
or signal service work in the Navy, an acuity lantern and illumina-
tion scale for the detection of small errors in refraction was devised
by C. E. Ferree and Gr. Rand, of Bryn Mawr College. Roughly,
but 25-30 per cent, of the men on battleships have sufficient acuity
of vision to qualify for such observational work. The apparatus
devised has proved of value in clinical practise for the determina-
tion of the exact amount and placement of the correction of
astigmatism.
Three methods of securing physical measurements and specifica-
tions of color were described by Lloyd A. Jones and Prentice Reeves,
of the Eastman Kodak Co. W. R. Niles, of the Carnegie Nutrition
132 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
Laboratory, explained an apparatus of simpler construction and
operation than the Dodge photographic technique for recording
ocular movements. This apparatus was used for obtaining a speedy
and reliable quantitative score for the accuracy of eye-hand pursuit
coordinations of candidates for service as aviators. A correlation
of -j- 0.40 was found between success in this test and ' ' progress in
learning to fly."
The Session for Experimental Psychology closed with a paper
by Captain Garry C. Myers, Camp Upton, concerning the role of
imagination as an indication to the motives, interests and aptitudes
of young children.
Session for Intelligence Tests
Much interest was evoked by data presented by E. A. Doll, of
Princeton University, from a million and a half army recruits and
other subjects as regards the median mental age of adults, commonly
assumed to 'be about sixteen years for unselected groups. The
Stanford-Binet median mental age equivalent of army recruits is
thirteen years; of negro and foreign^born recruits ten years; of
adult male state prisoners thirteen, the actual tests used in each case
being the Army Alpha. Five hundred typical public-school chil-
dren examined by Alpha show no increase in median scores by age
after thirteen, the same being true of juvenile delinquents, ages six-
teen to thirty years. From these data the suggestion was made that
the median mental age level of native white adults is approximately
thirteen years. No attempt was made to determine the life age
limit of mental age growth, since, it was suggested, "emotional de-
velopment, skill, acquisitions aptitudes and the like probably con-
tinue to develop indefinitely. ' ' The upper age limit of f eeble-mind-
edness is not coincident with the lower mental age limit of normal-
ity, since it appeared that the borderline zone for feeble-mindedness
may cover a range from mental age seven to thirteen years. The
application of mental age or I.Q. as criterion of mental defect is
specially limited in the case of individuals of ten or more years
chronological age. Data harmonizing with these results was pre-
sented by F. L. Wells, of McLean Hospital. The median I.Q. (Stan-
ford scale) of 102 cases of mental breakdown at McLean is 88, but
I.Q's of 100 are frequent and I.Q's of 119 have been found in
patients conspicuously incapable of self-maintenance. Only in the
organic psychoses does the breakdown regularly involve the ide-
ational capacities with which the intelligence scales are concerned.
Normal and even superior "intelligence" is often associated with
grave judgment and conduct disorder. Intelligence scales measure
essentially ability to deal with ideas, as distinct from ability to deal
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 133
with things or with people. Psychotic breakdowns are essentially
failures of adjustment to the social environment. The speaker em-
phasized the minor role of "intelligence" (ideational capacity) in
mental balance, urging a conception of education as a discipline of
character rather than knowledge.
With a few changes, the Binet tests were successfully employed
by S. P. Hayes, Mt. Holyoke College, in measuring the intelligence
of the blind. A modification of the Pressey group tests also gave
high correlations with the Binet scores and abilities estimated by
teachers. E. L. Woods, Wisconsin State Department of Public In-
struction, reported on the use of the recently devised Virginia tests
Alpha in group testing of intelligence of delinquent girls. J. B.
Miner, Carnegie Institute of Technology, displayed a method of
utilizing three-dimensional models for representing individual differ-
ences in complex abilities such as salesmanship. Certain relations
not now taken care of in frequency tables, correlations, multiple
regression, etc., can be displayed by such models.
L. W. Webb, Northwestern University, found the Pearson coeffi-
cient of correlation between rate of reading (Monroe Silent Reading
Test) and the Army Alpha and Thurstone tests A and B ranging
from -j- 0.47 to -{- 0.59 ; comprehension of reading gave coefficients
ranging from -f 0.48 to + 0.69. Speed and comprehension of read-
ing correlate -J- 0.85. The speaker contended that these correlations
show too large a dependence of the pencil and paper tests upon
rapidity of comprehension in reading.
L. M. Thurstone, Carnegie Institute of Technology, found the
cycle-omnibus form of intelligence test to be of great service in
furnishing data for recommending candidates for admission to
engineering colleges, in advising committees on scholarship in cases
of delinquent students and in giving vocational counsel. S. S.
Colvin, of Brown University, reported a correlation of -|- 0.60 be-
tween success in The Brown Intelligence Tests and the standing in
college for the first two terms. The Thorndike Tests, first used in
1919, proved to be of great prognostic value and showed a high
correlation with itself in repeated tests on the same subject.
Joint Meeting with the American Association of Clinical
Psychologists
D. Mitchell, Pelman Institute, defined clinical psychology as a
"professional practise" as contrasted with the "science" of labora-
tory psychology. Clinical psychology was again contrasted with
"applied psychology" largely on grounds that the latter field may
have no relation to the individual. Clinical psychology is the prac-
tise of determining mental status in order to prescribe kinds and
134 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
methods of education, of detecting specific abilities and disabilities
of vocational significance, and the manipulation of emotional devel-
opment for desirable social reactions. Dr. A. F. Bronner, Judge
Baker Foundation, emphasizing the function of clinical psychology
as that of individual diagnosis, gave illustrations of the failure of
general intelligence tests to betray significant variations in mental
equipment. The necessity of devising tests for many specific
abilities was urged. Florence Mateer, Bureau of Juvenile Research,
has found that whereas the mental age or I.Q. is of little value in the
detection of psychopathic conditions due to syphilis, a detailed ac-
count of the range of plus and minus scores, and more precise
measures of the individual responses often give a reliable clue to
either congenital or acquired syphilis. The same type of analysis
generally differentiates the psychopathic from the non-psychopathic,
no matter what the mental age may be.
E. E. Southard, Psychopathic Hospital of Boston, presented a
table of terms for the systematic expansion of terminology for
mental symptoms and processes. Arnold Gessell, Yale University,
discussed several cases of hemi-hypertrophy in relation to mental
defect. Morton Prince gave several illustrative cases of a method
of securing dissociation of the mind whereby one of two or more
antagonistic trends becomes dominant, thus permitting an insight
into the conflicting motives.
H. L. Rolling-worth, Columbia University, presented a new inter-
pretation of functional neuroses, in terms of redintegrative re-
actions. In normal processes of perception or thinking the stimulus
is a portion of a former gross situation which redintegrates the total
responses. The distinction between the redintegrative reaction of
the normal and the neurotic is that in the former only a significant
detail provokes the total reaction not any chance item. Redinte-
gration may take place on the cortical level leading to ordinary
understanding, thought or perception, or it may take place on the
postural level giving the picture of conversion hysteria, or it may
take place on the autonomic level giving rise to the anxiety neurosis.
If cortical redintegration takes place, the postural and autonomic
responses may be determined by the total pattern of the stimulus
and are not redintegrative. Cortical immaturity or weakness would
mean greater redintegrative predisposition on the other two levels.
Since the postural level is more closely connected with the cortical
level than is the autonomic, intellectual inferiority would predispose
one more definitely toward conversion hysteria than toward the
anxiety type. Measurement of psychoneurotic soldiers shows that
not only are they in general intellectually inferior, but also the con-
version forms represent a lower intelligence level than do the anxiety
forms.
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 135
A most valuable and practical method of evaluating school at-
tainments in terms of mental ability is the result of studies by
Rudolf Pintner, of Ohio State University. A mental test alone is
not sufficient to diagnose a child accurately; measures of school at-
tainment based on both age and grade norms are needed. Two
survey tests, one mental and one educational, were devised and ap-
plied to 1,500 cases. Percentile values are converted into a so-called
"index" ranging from zero to one hundred. The median indices
serve as a measure for the school. A high mental age with low edu-
cational index indicates deficiencies in instruction, whereas a close
agreement between the two indices indicates efficiency in the school.
In the same way different classes in the same school or different
individuals in the same class may be compared, enabling one to
correlate innate ability with possible attainment and to apply cor-
rective measures when the need appears.
Session for Educational and Comparative Psychology
J. F. Dashiell, University of North Carolina, pointed out certain
errors in the straightforward statistical explanation of learning in
the maze by the factors of frequency and recency. The contention
was based upon such findings as these : a rat will enter a blind alley
opening straight ahead 5 times out of 8, the exit from a blind alley
opening at the side is more likely to be in a forward than in a
reverse direction in about the ratio of 3.5 to 1.
J. L. Ulrich, Johns Hopkins University, in maze experiments
with rats emphasized the role of reflex mechanisms in learning as
opposed to sensory motor connections or "sensory impressions."
The reflex extension and flexion of the rat's limbs were discovered
to be of great influence upon learning in the maze.
W. T. Shepherd, Washington, D. C., in a study of 148 children,
ages eight to thirteen years, emphasized the importance of the edu-
cational and social experiences and of the influence of respected
teachers or friends upon the development of religious ideals.
Tests devised to measure such functions as persistence, con-
scientiousness, application and emotional control are being applied
to Junior High School and other students by S. L. Pressey, of
Indiana University. Correlations of results from these tests with
general intelligence, health and estimates of intelligence were pre-
sented. L. C. Pressey, Indiana University, urged group testing of
general intelligence in the primary school as a means of studying
the effect of school training upon tests subsequently given. Data
permitting comparisons of test findings on children of the laboring
and professional classes, whites and negroes, etc., were presented.
E. A. Kirkpatrick, Fitchburg State Normal School, believes that
136 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
normal school /pupils may 'be trained in fifteen hours to use the
Binet tests in classifying pupils. Less time is required to handle
group tests, 'but much more is needed to enable the student to score,
tabulate and interpret the results. Daniel Starch, University of
Wisconsin, found in data obtained from 1,000 first-year pupils, that
approximately equal mental ability may exist with great differences
in language ability. Correlations ranging from -}- 0.25 to -)- 0.28
between interest in college subjects and grades received in them
were found by K. W. Bridges, Ohio State University. The corre-
lation between interest and the subject's estimate of his ability in
the courses was higher -f 0.50 to -f- 0.59.
Session for Social and Applied Psychology
F. H. Allport, Harvard University, reported on experiments
dealing with influence of the presence and actions of other human
beings upon the motor, emotional and mental performances of a su'b-
ject. The chief results noted were (1) a facilitation of movement,
(2) a compulsion toward haste at the expense of quality, (3) an ob-
jective direction of attention, (4) experiences of rivalry, and (5)
tendency toward social conservatism in the returning of judgments.
The auditory reaction-time tests used chiefly by the Italian Gov-
ernment for the selection of aviator pilots were applied to success-
ful and unsuccessful American aviators by F. C. Dockeray and
S. Isaacs, with satisfactory results. Success in a rather simple test
of muscular steadiness showed a high correlation with ability in
flying.
E. P. Frost, of the Rochester Chamber of Commerce, emphasized
four industrial problems which offered special opportunities to the
psychologist: (1) The reduction of labor turnover by means of
selecting men adapted by intellect, temperament and special abili-
ties to the particular task; (2) by devising programmes for the
Americanization of foreigners and illiterate through wise educa>-
tion; (3) by testing the problems of the shop foreman both as to
the management of labor and the conduct of the vestibule or train-
ing school, and (4) by contributing to the effectiveness of continu-
ation schools where instruction is given during periods of the work-
ing day.
From data obtained in several extensive investigations cited by
E. L. Thorndike, Teachers College, Columbia University, it appears
that even experienced judges can not treat an individual as a com-
pound of separate qualities, such as intelligence, industry, technical
skill, reliability, etc., and to assign a magnitude to each of these in
independence of the others. The correlations between such traits
are too high and too even, the ratings being apparently affected by a
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 137
marked tendency to think of the person in general as rather good or
rather inferior and to be influenced in all judgments by this general
attitude. It was suggested that observers should 1 report the evidence,
not a rating, and that the ratings should be given on the evidence
for each quality separately.
D. G. Paterson and B. Runnl, The Scott Company, described a
method of obtaining more objective criteria in the use of rating
scales. By the older method, leadership, for example, might be
defined and judged in terms of initiative, force, self-reliance, tact,
loyalty, cooperation, etc. By the suggested scale one would judge
the ability to develop a loyal and effective organization by adminis-
tering justice, inspiring confidence and winning the cooperation of
his subordinates a "man to man" type of comparison. Tendencies
for single judges to estimate too high or too low might be corrected,
by the devise of "Master Scales."
A. W. Kornhauser and B. Ruml, of the Scott Company, reported
on some recent developments in trade-test theory. The usual form
of trade test consists of a fixed set of questions with norms estab-
lished for the test as a whole. A new departure consists in estab-
lishing norms for the individual questions. Hence (1) a test may
be made as brief as desired, (2) it may be varied at will to prevent
coaching, (3) it becomes unnecessary to give easier questions than
those already passed or more difficult ones than those already failed,
(4) new individual questions may 'be added or undesirable ones
dropped without necessitating a ^standardization of the norms for
'the whole test. By a change in the use of regression lines from the
method employed in the army test, wherein the average score in the
test giving the grade of trade ability, to the reverse wherein the
actual numerical 'chance that a man making a particular score or an
individual question is a novice, apprentice, journeyman, or expert,
it is possible (1) to place each question at the level where it differ-
entiates most effectively, (2) questions may be weighted in propor-
tion to their differentiating value, and (3) questions may be
weighted differently if passed or failed.
ARTHUR I. GATES.
TEACHERS COLLEGE,
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY.
REVIEWS AND ABSTRACTS OF LITERATURE
General Psychology. WALTER S. HUNTER. Chicago : The University
of Chicago Press. 1919. Pp. xiii -f 351.
This is another elementary text on general psychology. So many
brief books on psychology have been published in the United States
that there seems to be no excuse for extending the list.
138 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
Hunter's three-hundred-and-fifty-page text, however, differs de-
cidedly from many others. Students in general courses will find this
book very interesting as a textbook stating the fundamental facts,
procedures and applications of psychology, rather than presenting
the foundation for students who are preparing to do advanced work
in the subject.
The author assumes that the usual student is first interested in
the general field of psychology. He therefore devotes the first four
chapters of his text to the following subjects : Subject Matter of Psy-
chology, Animal Psychology, Individual and Applied Psychology,
Abnormal Psychology, Social and Kacial Psychology. The confin-
ing of the above four subjects to 110 pages makes their treatment
seem rather brief and unsatisfactory. It does, however, introduce
students to those fields about which there is the most inquiry on the
part of the general public. The selected bibliographies enable one to
continue reading in the field of his peculiar interests.
Part II. takes up Normal Human Adult Psychology. The dis-
cussion is very much like that found in the usual elementary text-
book. The author has succeeded admirably in drawing most of his
illustrations from recorded experiments. This introduces the stu-
dent to experimental source material rather than to the simple, in-
sipid personal experiences so often used by psychological writers.
The book is illustrated with 55 figures, distributed through the
entire volume. This adds something to the attractiveness of the text.
The theoretical standpoint of Professor Hunter is one of a com-
bination of behaviorism and structuralism. He does not rule out
introspective data, but supplements it with objective data wherever
possible.
The material presented, along with some reference work and
supplemental studies, would occupy a class for one semester. With
the increased public interest in psychology, along with its increased
application, there seems to be a need for more extended courses in
general psychology. Professor Hunter's book will doubtless be
adopted by many instructors, but it will have to be supplemented
with a great deal of library and laboratory material.
J. V. BREITWIESER.
UNIVERSITY OP CALIFORNIA.
JOURNALS AND NEW BOOKS
REVUE PHILOSOPHIQUE. May-June, 1919. La nature et
le mouvement d'apres Aristote (pp. 353-368) : OCTAVE HAMELIN. -
Aristotle's theory of movement is markedly dynamistic and vital-
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 139
istic, and tends to become idealistic. La philosophic frangaise en
Amcrique (pp. 369^23) : WOODBRIDGE RILEY. -This second article
deals especially with the history of Comte 's influence and of Positiv-
ism in America. La spiritualization des tendances (pp. 424-451) :
P. PAULHAN. - Discusses the organization, spiritualization, and so-
cialization of tendencies, with an examination of the diverse forms
of spiritualization, the mental conditions favoring spiritualization or
unfavorable to it, and distinguishes between spiritualization and
idealization. Remarques sur la psychologic collective (pp. 455^174) :
J. SAGERET. -"The progress of thought has . . . the paradoxical
character of resulting in an increased solidarity between the indi-
vidual and humanity and of augmenting at the same time the facility
with which the individual detaches his soul from humanity; the
progress of thought renders man more social in his formation, more
individual in the power of his spirit." Revue critique. Sur la
philosophic de la guerre. Analyses et Comptes rendns. De Witt H.
Parker, The Self and Nature: ANDRE LALANDE. John Laird, Prob-
lems of the Self: R. GUENON. Julien Tiersot, Un demi-siecle de
musique frangaise: LIONEL DAURIAC. T. M. Moustoxidi, Les sys-
temes esthetiques en France: CHARLES LALO. Gonzague True, La
Grace: H. DELACROIX. F. Moral, Essai sur I'introversion mystique:
H. DELACROIX. Le Pangermanisme philosophique : TH. RUYSSEN.
Les Cahiers de Probus: E. CRAMAUSSEL. Revue des Periodiques.
Cory, Herbert Ellsworth. The Intellectuals and the Wage Work-
ers: A Study in Educational Psychoanalysis. New York: The
Sunwise Turn. 1919. Pp. 273.
Elliot, Hugh. Modern Science and Materialism. New York and
London: Longmans, Green and Co. 1919. Pp. 211. $3.00.
Lodge, Rupert Clendon. An Introduction to Modern Logic. Min-
neapolis : Perine Book Co. 1920. Pp. xiv -f 361.
Shaw, Charles Gray. The Ground and Goal of Human Life. New
York : New York University Press. 1919. Pp. xii -f 593. $3.50.
NOTES AND NEWS
PSYCHOLOGICAL TERMINOLOGY
THE Committee on Terminology of the American Psychological
Association is taking up for examination terms in the fields of Sen-
sation and Cognition. Psychologists interested in the precise use of
terms are invited to assist the committee in its work by calling the
chairman's attention to
(1) Psychological terms used with two or more different mean-
140 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
ings (whether distinguished or not), and terms used indefinitely or
ambiguously in contemporary writings.
(2) Pairs or groups of terms which lead to confusion when used
inte rchangeably .
(3) Foreign terms needing definition or translation.
(4) Books and articles containing systematic lists of cognate
terms, or discussions of ambiguous terms. (Full references desired.)
It is a matter of prime importance in any science to clear up
double meanings and imperfect synonyms. The word feeling is
used in standard psychological works with several different mean-
ings. The words intellect and intelligence are used by some writers
interchangeably, while others draw a sharp distinction between
them. There are many instances in the literature of both kinds of
confusion.
The committee wishes to include a large number of such terms in
its next report, either defining and distinguishing them or citing
discussions in easily accessible sources. This list will not be confined
to sensation and cognition, but will cover the entire field of psychol-
ogy. Will readers of this magazine assist the committee to make the
list fairly complete?
HOWARD C. WARREN,
Chairman.
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY,
PRINCETON, N. J.
IT may not be generally known that on October 31, 1918, the li-
brary of the University of Nancy was struck by an incendiary bomb
and 160,000 volumes destroyed. Such a loss is very difficult to re-
place, and the university appreciates very greatly any contributions
of books such as a university library ought to possess, and any offers
of desirable periodicals.
THE prize of $100 offered in 1914 for the best paper on the Availa-
bility of Pearson's Formulae for Psychophysics (this JOURNAL, Vol.
XI., p. 27 f.), has been awarded to Dr. Godfrey T. Thomson, Arm-
strong College, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, for a paper entitled "On the
Application of Pearson's Methods of Curve-Fitting to the Problems
of Psychophysics, especially to the Data of Urban 's Experiments on
Lifted Weights : in four Parts, together with Part V., On the Use of
Compound Curves in the Analysis of Heterogeneous Material, and
Part VI., On an Outline of an Attempt to Make a Generalized Psy-
chometric Function."
VOL. XVII. No. 6, MARCH 11, 1920
THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS
CHRISTIANITY AND HISTORY
III. CHRONOLOGY AND CHURCH HISTORY
THE history of history repeats itself. Tradition and myth, epic
and genealogy, priestly lore of world eras and the marking
of time, criticism and history follow each other or fuse in the long
evolution of that rational self-consciousness which projects itself
into the past as it builds up the synthesis of the present. Similar
pathways lie behind all developed historiographies. Indeed, the
parallel between the histories of the history of different nations is so
close as to rob the successive chapters of much of the charm of
novelty. When we have reviewed the historiography of Greece, that
of Rome strikes us as familiar. The same likeness lies already in
the less developed historiographies of oriental cultures. They all
emerge from a common base; and, to use a biological expression,,
ontogeny repeats phylogeny the individual repeats the species-
The law of growth seems to apply to history as though it were an
organism with an independent evolution, instead of what it really
is, a mere reflection of changing societies.
The explanation apparently lies at hand, in the similar evolution
of the societies which produce the history. But, from such premises
one would hardly expect the historiography of a religion to exhibit
the same general lines of development. Yet in the history of Chris-
tian history we have much the same evolution of material as in that
of Greece or Rome. Naturally, the priestly element is stronger, and
the attempts at rationalizing the narratives more in evidence. But
it is the absence rather than the presence of sophistication which
strikes one most. The genealogies play their role for the kingdom
of the Messiah as for the cities of Hellas, 1 Hesiods of Jewish and
Christian theology present their schemes of divinely appointed eras,
and through the whole heroic period of the church, legends of saints
and martyrs furnish the unending epic of the unending war, where
the hosts of heaven fought with men, not for a vanished Troy but
1 Cf. Julius Af rieanus 's pioneer work in this direction, in harmonizing the
variant genealogies of Christ in the Gospel, quoted by Eusebius, I., 7.
141
142 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
for an eternal city. Finally, the work of Christian logographi in
the apologists and every theologian was an apologist reduced the
scheme to prose. The parallel would not hold, however, beyond the
merest externals if it had not been for the development of Christian
chronology ; for the thought of writing history was but little in the
minds of theologians, and hardly more in those of martyrologists.
From the apologists, face to face with the criticism of the unbeliev-
ing world, came the demand for more rigid methods of comparative
chronology, by which they could prove the real antiquity and direct
descent of Christianity. The same kind of practical need had pro-
duced similar, if more trivial, documentation by pagan priests and
was later to repeat itself in medieval monasteries. So that in the
Christian church, as in the antique world generally, history proper
was born of the application of research and chronology to meet the
exacting demands of skepticism, as well as of the desire to set forth
great deeds.
The path to Christian historiography lies, therefore, through a
study of Christian chronology. The basis for this was the work
of the Jewish scholars of the diaspora. When the Christian apolo-
gists of the second and third centuries attempted to synchronize the
Old Testament history with that of the gentiles, they could fall back
upon the work of a Jewish scribe, Justus of Tiberius, who wrote in
the reign of Hadrian. He prepared a chronicle of Jewish kings,
working along the same uncertain basis of " generations " as had
been used in gentile chronicles, and so claiming for Moses an an-
tiquity greater than that of the oldest figures in Greek legend. The
difficulties in the way of any counter proof lent this statement great
Talue in argument, especially since it was merely a mathematical
formulation of a belief already established in the church. But,
although the argument of priority was familiar from early days,
the first formally prepared Christian chronology did not appear
until the middle of the third century when Julius Africanus wrote
his Chronographia. It was a work in five books, drawing upon the
writings of Josephus, Manetho and pagan scholars, and arranging
the eras of the old dispensation in a series symbolical of creation
itself. The duration of the world is to reach six thousand years, after
which is to come a thousand-year Sabbath. The birth of Christ is
put five thousand five hundred years from Adam, which leaves five
hundred more before the end. Half-way along this stretch of cen-
turies, three thousand years from the creation we come upon the death
of Palek, under whom the world was parcelled out, as is recorded in
the twenty-fifth chapter of Genesis. 2
2 Cf. the monumental study of Gelzer, Julius Africanus (1898), wMch has
disentangled the fragile threads of his chronology as preserved in various ways.
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 143
A scheme like this is a chronology only by courtesy; and yet a
glance at the dating along the pages of the authorized edition of the
Bible will show how relatively close to it has been the accepted
dating of the world's history down to our own time. Critically con-
sidered, it was merely a variation of the symbolism of Origen an
allegory of the general scheme of history instead of an allegory of
details. It was symbolism on a bolder and larger scale, all the more
convincing because while it supplied the frame-work for events it did
not have to harmonize or explain them away. Three main influ-
ences made for its success. The absence of any continuous Jewish
chronology offered it open field; theology demanded that the world's
history should center upon the life of Christ and the coming of the
kingdom ; and the idea of world eras was just in line with the ideas
of pagan savants who had attained a rude conception of natural law
in the movement of history. A treatment of history which could
appeal to the great name of Varro for its pagan counterpart was
not lightly to be rejected. The best minds of antiquity saw
though dimly the outer world as a reflection of the human reason,
but what Platonic idea ever mastered recalcitrant phenomena so
beautifully as this scheme of Christian history with its symmetry
established by a divine mathematics ?
One is tempted to turn aside to the absorbing problems of phi-
losophy which these crude solutions of world history open up. But
before us stands a great figure, a Herodotus among the logographi
of the early church. Eusebius of Cs&sarea, the father of Church
History, worked out from materials like these the chronology of the
world which was to be substantially that of all the subsequent history
of Europe to our own time, and preserved the precious fragments
of his predecessors in the first history of Christianity. 8
Eusebius meets the two qualifications which Polybius prescribed
as indispensable for the historian. He was a man of affairs, of wide
knowledge of the world, and held high office in the state whose
fortunes he described. He it was who at the great council of Nicaea
(325 A.D.) sat at the right hand of Constantine and delivered the
opening oration in honor of the emperor.* Few historians of either
church or state have ever had more spectacular tribute paid to their
learning and judicial temper. For it was apparently these two
qualities which especially equipped Eusebius for so distinguished an
3 The name Eusebius was a very common one in the records of the early
church. There are 40 Eusebiuses, contemporaries of the historian, noted in
Smith and Wace's Dictionary of Christian Biography, and in all 137 from the
first eight centuries. Euse'bius of Caesarea took the surname Pamphili after the
death of his master Pamphilus, out of respect for him.
< Cf. Sozomen, H. E., I., 19.
144 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
honor. At least one likes to think so; but perhaps the distinction
fell to him because he was as well an accomplished courtier and as
much the apologist of Constantine as of the Christian faith.
This incident fixes for us the life of Eusebius. Born about 260
A.D., he was at the fullness of his powers when the church gained its
freedom, and he lived on until 339 or 340. He had studied in the
learned circle of Pamphilus of Csesarea, whose great library was to
furnish him with many of his materials, 5 and there came under the
spell of Origen, whose influence was supreme in the circle of
Pamphilus. Nothing is more difficult in criticism than the estimate
of one man's influence upon another and nothing more light-
heartedly hazarded. It would be hard to say what Eusebius would
have been without the works of Origen to inspire him, but that they
did influence him is beyond question. Eusebius was not an original
thinker. He lacked the boldness of genius, but to witness that bold-
ness in Origen must have been an inspiration toward freedom from
ecclesiasticism and traditionalism. 6 His history is no mere bishop's
history, it is the record of a religion as well as of a church. Its
scholarship is critical, not credulous. From Origen, too, may have
come the general conception which makes the first church history a
chapter in the working out of a vast world-scheme, the "economy"
of God. 7 But the time had now come for such a conception to be
commonplace. It was no longer a speculation; the recognition by
the empire was making it a fact.
If one were to search for influences moulding the character
of Eusebius 's history this triumph of the church would necessarily
come first. No history of Christianity worthy of the name could
well appear during the era of persecutions. Not that the persecu-
tions were so fierce or so continuous as has been commonly believed.
Eusebius himself, for instance, lived safely through the most severe
persecution, and visiting Pamphilus in prison for Pamphilus suf-
fered martyrdom carried on his theological works in personal touch
with his master. But though the persecutions have been exagger-
ated, the situation of the church was not one to invite the historian.
Constantine was its deliverer; in a few years it passed from oppres-
5 Cf. Eusebius' Martyrs in Palestine, in loco; Jerome, ~De viribus illu^tris,
75, 81.
These at least are the two main influences of Origen upon Eusebius ac-
cording to McGiffert and Heinrici. Cf. McGiffert's edition of the Church His-
tory, p. 7, and Georg Heinrici, Das Urchristentum in der KirchengescMchte des
Eusebiux, Leipzig, 1894. Heinrici here presents the case against F. Overbeck's
view (Tiber die Anf tinge der Kirchengeschichteschreibung, Basel, 1892), that
Eusebius follows the hierarchical episcopal thread in a sort of constitutional
history of the church.
iCf. Heinrici, op. tit., p. 13.
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 145
sion to power. And in the hour of its triumph Christian scholar-
ship was to find, in a bishop high at court, a historian worthy not only
of the great deeds of the saints and martyrs but of the new imperial
position of the church.
Eusebius was a voluminous writer, " historian, apologist, topog-
rapher, exegete, critic, preacher, dogmatic writer." 8 But his fame
as a historian rests upon two works, the Church History and the
Chronicle. Both were epoch-making. The one has earned for the
author the title of Father of Church History; the other set for
Christendom its frame-work in the history of the world.
The Chronicle was written first. 9 It is composed of two parts:
the Chronographia and the Chronological Canons. The first of
these is an epitome of universal history in the form of excerpts from
the sources, arranged nation by nation, along with an argument for
the priority of Moses and the bible. It is a source-book on the
epochs of history, much like those in use to-day as manuals in our
colleges. The second part consists of chronological tables with
marginal comments. The various systems of chronology, Chaldsean,
Greek, Eoman, etc., are set side by side with a biblical chronology
which carries one back to the creation, although the detailed and
positive annals begin only with the birth of Abraham. The Canons
therefore present in a single, composite form the annals of all
antiquity at least all that was of interest to Christendom. It
presented them in simplest mathematical form. Eows of figures
marked the dates down the center of the page; on the right hand
side was the column of profane history ; on the left hand the column
of sacred history. 10
The fate of this work is of peculiar interest. It is doubtful if
any other history has ever exercised an influence comparable to that
which it has had upon the western world; yet not a single copy of
the original text has survived ; the Latin west knew only the second
8 Lightf oot in Smith & Waee 's Dictionary of Christian Biography. A bril-
liant article.
9 He already refers to it in the opening of his Church History (1:1), and
also in the Eclogce Propheticce (1:1) and in the Prceparatio Ev angelica, X:9.
which were both written before 313. As the Chronicle when it reached Jerome
was carried down to 325, it is conjectured that there may have been a second
edition.
10 In the present text some profane history notes are on the left side, but
this was due to the fact that the comments on profane history were fuller than
those on sacred history, and were crowded over for reasons of space.
Eusebius was largely indebted for his plan to Castor, whom he invokes at
the beginning and end of the lists for Sicyon, Argos and Athens. Cf. Gelzer,
Julius Africanus, II., pp. 63 f .
On the relations between Eusebius and Julius Africanus see Gelzer, op. cit.,
II., 23-107.
146 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
part, and that in the hasty translation of Jerome. Modern research
has unearthed a solitary Armenian translation of the work as a
whole, and modern scholars have compared this with the fragments
preserved by Byzantine chronographers 11 until finally, in the open-
ing of the twentieth century the work is again accessible if only
to the learned. If, however, recovery of the chronicle is a work of
archaeological philology, like the recovery of an ancient ruin, yet
all the time that it had lain buried this little book of dates and
comments had been determining the historical outlook of Europe. 12
For the next thousand years most histories were chronicles, and they
were built after the model of Jerome's translation of Eusebius's
Canons. Every medieval monastery that boasted of enough culture
to have a scriptorium and a few literate monks, was connecting up
its own rather fabulous but fairly recent antiquity with the great
antiquity of Rome and Judea through the tables of Eusebius's
arithmetic.
This anonymous immortality of the great Chronicle is easily
accounted for. It was not a work of literature, but of mathematics.
Now mathematics is as genuine art as is literature, art of the most
perfect type ; but its expression, for that very reason, is not in the
variable terms of individual appreciations. It is not personal but
universal. It does not deal with qualities but with numbers; or at
best it deals with qualities merely as the distinguishing elements in
numbers. The structure is the thing, not the meaning nor character
of the details. And the structure depends upon the materials.
Hence there is little that is Eusebian about Eusebius's Chronicle,
except the chronicle itself. It has no earmarks of authorship like
the style of a Herodotus or a Thucydides. But all the same its
content was the universal possession of the succeeding centuries.
There is, however, a simpler reason for the fate of Eusebius's
Chronicle. It has a forbidding exterior. It had even too much
mathematics and too much history for the Middle Ages; they were
satisfied with the results of the problem. But behind this forbid-
n Especially Georgius Syncellus. These chronographers preserved such
large extracts that Joseph Scaliger was able to risk a reconstruction of the text
from them alone. Scaliger 's first edition was published in 1606, second edition
in 1658. The Armenian version was published at Venice in 1818 by J. B. Aucher
with a Latin translation. The text in Migne, that by Cardinal Mai (1833) is
based upon this; but the classic work on the Chronicle is that of Schoene (Vol.
I., 1875, Vol. II., 1866), while the Armenian text has recently been published
with parallel German translation by Karst in the great edition of Eusebius'
worka now appearing in the series, Die Griechischen Christlichen Schriftsteller
der ersten drei Jahrhunderte. It has also t(hie version of Jerome, ed. by Helm.
12 Joseph Scaliger refers thus to the influence of Eusebius. ' ' Qui post
Eusebium scripserunt, omne scriptum de temporibus aridum esse censuerunt,
quod non hujus fontibus irrigatum esset. " (Quoted in Migne, P. G. 19:14.)
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 147
ding exterior the modern scholar finds a synthesis of alluring charm.
Parallel columns of all known eras extend up and down the pages;
eras of Abraham, David, Persia, Egypt, Greece, Borne, etc. It is
interesting to see this tangle of columns simplify as the diverse
nations come and go; and finally all sink into the great unity of
Rome. At last the modern world of Eusebius 's own time was left
but four columns, the years of Rome (A. U. C.), of Olympiads, of
Roman Consuls, and of Christ. The rest was already ancient his-
tory. As one follows the sweep of these figures and watches the
steady line of those events where the Providence of God bore down
the forces of the unbeliever, one realizes that in this convincing
statement lay the strongest of all defenses of the faith. Here, com-
pressed into a few pages, lies the evidence of history for the Chris-
tian world-view. Origen's great conception that pagan history was
as much decreed by Jehovah as sacred history finds in the Chronicle
its most perfect expression; the facts speak for themselves. 13 No
fickle Fortuna could ever have arranged with such deliberate aim
the rise and fall of empires. History is the reservoir not of argu-
ment but of proof, and the proof is mathematical. 14
The human element of humor, however, comes into the situation
when one turns back to the opening paragraph and learns the atti-
tude of Eusebius himself. "Now at the very beginning, I make
this declaration before all the world : let no one ever arrogantly con-
tend that a sure and thorough knowledge of chronology is attain-
able. This every one will readily believe who ponders on the incon-
trovertible words of the Master to his disciples : ' It is not for us to
know the times or the seasons, which the Father hath put in his
own power' (Acts 1:7). For it seems to me that he, as Lord God,
uttered that decisive word with reference not merely to the day
of judgment, but with reference to all times, to the end that he
might restrain those who devote themselves too boldly to such vain
investigations. ' ' 15
13 This view of universal history places Eusebius on a distinctly higher
plane than that of a mere apologist. It enabled him to have somewhat of the
Herodotean sweep and breadth. Cf. Heinrici, op. cit., pp. 13 ff. Eusebius, R.E.,
1:7.
i* The translation of the Canons by Jerome, while apparently superior to the
Armenian version, bears the marks of careless haste. He tells us himself (Prcef.
L:13) that it is an opus tumultuarium, and adds that he dictated it most hur-
riedly to a scribe. He must have meant, so Schoene thinks (p. 76), that he dic-
tated the marginal comments, not the rows of figures. Likely a notarius trans-
lated tne figures into Koman, and Jerome added the notes.
A great deal of discussion has arisen over the fact that in the Church His-
tory, Eusebius differs decidedly from the chronology of the Chronicle.
is Chronicle, Preface.
148 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
We have left .ourselves little space for the work by which Euse-
bius is chiefly known, the Ecclesiastical History. So far as students
of theology and church history are concerned, little space is needed,
for the work itself is readily accessible and that, too, in an English
edition, and magnificently translated. 16 But the general student of
history seldom reads church history now, and the achievement of
Eusebius shares the common fate. Yet it is a great achievement,
and a genuine surprise awaits the reader who turns to it. One
might expect that the age of Constantine would produce a history
of the obscure, unstoried institution which had suddenly risen to
the splendor of an imperial church, but one could hardly expect
to find out of that arena of fierce theological conflict the calm and
lofty attitude of generous reserve and the sense of dominating
scholarly obligation for accuracy which characterize the first church
historian. The judgment of Gibbon, that the Ecclesiastical History
was grossly unfair, 17 is itself a prejudiced verdict. To be sure it
lacks the purely scientific aim, it is apologetic. But Eusebius is not
to be blamed for that; the wonder is that he preserved so just a
poise and so exacting a standard in view of the universal demands
of his time. We should not forget that the apologetic tone of
Christian historiography was also sanctioned by the pagan classics.
Even Polybius had demanded that history be regarded as a thing
of use, and Cicero, Sallust, Livy and Tacitus had applied the maxim
generously. Christian historiography should not bear the brunt
of our dissatisfaction with what was the attitude of nearly all
antiquity. 18
The Ecclesiastical History does not live by grace of its style.
Eusebius had no refined literary taste ; he wrote, as he thought, in
rambling and desultory fashion. But he combined with vast erudi-
tion a "sterling sense," and a "true historical instinct" in choosing
the selections from his store of facts and documents. 19 Conscious of
the value of the sources themselves, he weaves into his narrative
large blocks of the originals, and in this way has preserved many
a precious text which would otherwise be lost. The Ecclesiastical
History is less a narrative than a collection of documents, for which
16 By Professor A. C. McGiff ert, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second
Series, Vol. I., pp. 1-403. The same volume contains a translation of the Life
of Constantine by Ernest C. Bichardson, and an exhaustive bibliography.
i? Decline and Fall (Bury), 11:135; "He (Eusebius) indirectly confesses
that he has related whatever might redound to the glory, and that he has sup-
pressed all that could tend to the disgrace of religion;" adding in a foot-
note: "Such is the fair deduction from 1:82, and De Mart, Palast. c.12."
is This point is well made by H. O. Taylor in The Medieval Mind, I., 78-81.
19 Cf. the fine characterization by MeGiff ert, in the Prolegomena to his edi-
tion of the Ecclesiastical History, pp. 46 ff.
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 149
every student of Christianity is devoutly thankful, and more thank-
ful yet that the author was so keenly conscious of his responsibility.
Wherever his references can be verified they prove correct, which
gives a presumption of accuracy for those found in his work alone.
This scholarly accuracy was combined with a vast learning.
Eusebius had enjoyed the freedom of the great library of Pamphilus
at Antioch, in his earlier days. He tells us that he gathered ma-
terials as well in the library at Jerusalem founded by Bishop
Alexander, 20 and Constantine seems to have opened his archives to
him. 21 But he learned not less from the busy world in which he
lived. He was no recluse; he lived at the center of things, both
politically and ecclesiastically. His genial nature blinded him to
men's faults, and his judgment on contemporaries particularly
upon Constantine are of little value. 22 But even at his worst he
seldom recorded any marvelous event without the Herodotean
caution of throwing the responsibility back upon the original nar-
rative. There is no better example of this than the account in the
Life of Constantine of the emperor's vision of the cross. It was an
incident -all too likely to find ready that credence in Christian circles
which it found in subsequent ages. But, however much a courtly
panegyrist Eusebius could be, in matters of fact he is on his guard.
His account runs soberly enough : ' ' And while he was thus praying
with fervent entreaty, a most marvelous sign appeared to him from
heaven, the account of which might have been hard to believe had
it been related by any other person. But since the victorious Em-
peror himself long afterwards declared it to the writer of this
history, when he was honored with his acquaintance and society, and
confirmed his statement by an oath, who could hesitate to accredit
the relation, especially since the testimony of after-time has estab-
lished its truth?" 23
For two centuries Christian worship had lain hidden behind
the "Discipline of the Secret." The uninitiated knew little of
what was held or done by the adherents of this intolerant mystery,
"after the doors were shut." Constantine brought the new regime,
when persecution and secrecy ceased. Eusebius had lived through
the dark days of Diocletian, and although he himself had escaped
a fact sometimes held up against him his- dearest friends, and
above all his great teacher Pamphilus, had been martyred. Free
now to speak, therefore, he turns back from the "peace of the
20 Cf. H. E., VI.: 20.
21 Cf. H. K, V.:18.
22 The Life of Constantine is a panegyric rather than a biography ; and it
is unreliable even in questions of fact.
23 Life of Constantine, I. : 28;
150 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
church" to the years of persecution with a feeling for martyrs like
that of Homer for heroes, of the Middle Ages for wonder-working
saints. 24 He depicts their sufferings, however, not simply as the
material for heroic biography, but as forming the subject of a
glorious page of history, that of the great "peaceful struggle" by
which the Kingdom of the Messiah was to take its place among and
above the powers of this world. The martyrs of Palestine are fight-
ing the Punic wars for the kingdom of Christ.
It was reserved for a greater intellect that of Augustine to
carry this conception to its final form. But the outlines of Au-
gustine's City of God are already visible in the opening chapters
of the Ecclesiastical History, as its foundations were placed by
Eusebius's master, Origen. The Messiah is not a recent Christ, but
comes to us from the beginning of the world, witnessed to by Moses
and the prophets. And when "in recent times" Jesus came, the
new nation which appeared was not new but old, the Nation of
God's own Providence Christian and universal. The paean of the
victorious Church is sounded at the opening of its first history:
"A nation confessedly not small and not dwelling in some remote
corner of the earth, but the most numerous and pious of all nations,
indestructible and unconquerable, because it always receives assist-
ance from God." 25 This is the historical prologue to the City
of God. JAMES T. SHOTWELL.
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY.
SPAULDING 'S FREEDOM OF THE REASON
IN his recent volume, The New Rationalism, Professor Spaulding
advances the freedom of reason as one of the chief hypotheses
of the New Realism. To him the rationalism of Neo-Realism appears
fundamental to its realism; and rationalism consists essentially in
the recognition of the sovereign autonomy of reason. Rationalism,
according to Mr. Spaulding, is the position that acknowledges reason
as "the court of last resort" (p. 79) and subjects all experience (in-
cluding reason itself) to the test of reason. Neo-Realism, Mr.
Spaulding seeks to show, is essentially such a rationalism, presup-
posing the freedom of reason. The importance of Neo-Realism con-
sists in its discovery of a body of common principles universally pre-
supposed by rational thought. These common principles, from which
all philosophical systems are logically derived, are such principles
z* Cf. Heinrici, op. tit., p. 3.
as H. E., I., chap. 3.
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 151
as withstand the criticism of reason by being affirmed in their very
denial. Thus the ground of the autonomy of reason is recognized
in the self-presupposing character of its postulates.
Among the presuppositions of reason is one of special signifi-
cance, viz., the principle of the independent relation between know-
ing and the object which is known. It is through this postulate that
Mr. Spaulding's Rationalism becomes Realism. For the principle
of the independence of cognition and its object (which is, moreover,
empirically confirmed) involves both Realism and a narrower type
of Rationalism (p. xviii). The presupposition that cognition neither
creates nor affects its object implies both the independent reality of
facts of the senses and the equally independent reality of facts
of the reason divorced from nature and evolution (p. vii). It
is reason with this narrowed significance, as a non-natural prin-
ciple opposed to the world of sense, that plays the role of free reason
in Mr. Spaulding's book. With the conversion of his Rationalism
into Realism, the self-affirming autonomy of reason gives place to
the negative freedom of Realism, the so-called independence of
reason from the natural world.
But let us turn to Mr. Spaulding's own statement of his views.
"Reason is free," says Spaulding, "in the sense that it is neither
lawless nor yet causally determined by preceding psychical processes
in the individual and the race, but that it follows whither it is led by
the implicative structure of reality" (p. 427). Here reason is free
in three senses: (1) it is not guided by caprice, but is law-abiding;
(whether or not it has the principle of law within itself) ; (2) reasoa
can not be satisfactorily interpreted as causally determined by pre-
ceding natural processes; (3) reason is led by implication so far as
this relation is present in the real.
We may begin with a consideration of the second : that reason is
free of causal determination by the facts of its development. This
independence, though stated specifically with regard to the psychical,
would obviously apply no less to the physical antecedents of reason.
On this view, reason is independent of its entire phylogenetic and
ontogenetic history, both psychical and physical. Indeed the very
function of reason presupposes that it is the criterion of itself, an
organ capable of testing its own development, and hence logically-
fundamental to its history. But attention must be called to the fact
that Mr. Spaulding is wrong in assuming the relation between reason
and its history to be one of asymmetrical independence. Reason and
its development reciprocally involve and presuppose each other.
For reason, in fulfilling its function of criticism over the worlds
from which it emerges in the historical process, hereby admits that
152 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
only as a product of these worlds and presupposing them does reason
gain a meaning. On the other hand, reason is no less essentially
the ground of nature, for only reason reveals the meaning of nature.
But Mr. Spaulding holds reason to be free from determination
by the facts of its development on the further ground that universal
causation is a "self-contradictory" hypothesis. In undertaking to
postulate universal causation, we find ourselves apparently free to
choose between causation and freedom as the basis of reasoning.
This fundamental freedom to choose our assumption disproves uni-
versal causation, and shows freedom of reason to be the only "self-
confirming" postulate (p. 392). Our objection to Spaulding 's argu-
ment, however, is that it involves no more than a disguised appeal to
immediate feeling. It falls back upon the psychological feeling of
indeterminism 1 as the criterion for resolving the disjunction between
causation and freedom, and hence entirely begs the question. Psy-
chological immediacy and not the self-presupposing character of
freedom is made the basis of argument.
Another consideration urged by Spaulding against the causal
dependency of reason is the claim that reason is too unique, too indi-
vidual a stratum of reality to be deducible from lower strata.
Though the world of reason is undeniably built upon the worlds of
physics, chemistry, biology, etc., it yet remains distinct from all these
realms. Reason superimposes upon them a specific, non-additive
form of organization, involving properties quite different from the
properties of the worlds on which it supervenes. Because reason is
such a whole, possessing properties unlike those of its constituent
parts, reason must be causally independent of its parts, i. e., causally
independent of the worlds which serve it as genetic base. In Mr.
Spaulding 's words, "no lower level causally determines any higher
level" (p. 449). But such a statement can not escape challenge.
While it may be admitted that reason can not be adequately in-
terpreted in terms of naturalistic processes, yet certainly these
processes throw light on the nature of reason. Again, reason does
not fail to conform to the laws of the worlds below it ; causal inde-
pendence can not be claimed as absence of conformity. On the con-
trary, reason fulfills not only the laws of lower levels, but laws of
its own in addition. The autonomy of reason, moreover, is grounded
in the very interdependence of reason with the strata below it.
These lower worlds furnish reason the material on which to act.
The freedom of an isolated, independent reason would be entirely
formal and meaningless. Only by accepting the lower worlds as
i The apposite immediate feeling of 'being determined, of course, could be
cited equally well both as psychological fact and as the necessary assumption of
our very ability to conceive universal causation.
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 153
organic content does reason gain a realm over which to exert its
sovereign authority. By the power of criticism reason proves its
sovereignty, sitting in judgment of the worlds and revealing to them
wherein they are partial and inadequate. Reason shows itself
" higher" than the realms of physics, chemistry and biology by
manifesting itself both as inclusive of these worlds and as their
true ground and presupposition. Yet while outflanking them with
criticism, reason remains none the less dependent upon these worlds.
Mr. Spaulding to the contrary, lower levels do determine the higher ;
only the lower levels in turn are outflanked and determined by the
higher. Thus reason, while determined by the worlds below it, in
turn includes these worlds and manifests itself as their fundamental
presupposition.
Even granting that reason introduces a new organization with
unique properties, the question remains how this excludes the possi-
bility of explaining reason as causally determined by worlds of
simpler organization. Wholes may be granted qualitative specificity,
yet be regarded none the less as deductive combinations of their
parts. The theorems of geometry, for instance, are wholes with
unique properties, yet they are deducible from a handful of primi-
tive axioms and postulates. Indeed Spaulding 's denial of the possi-
bility of deducing the higher from the lower stands in odd contradic-
tion to certain accepted principles of Realism. Realism has gen-
erally maintained that parts are fundamental to the whole, and the
whole dependent upon the parts. Reason, as represented by Spaul-
ding, is a specific whole formed of certain constituents: physical,
chemical, biological, etc. One would naturally infer that the with-
drawal of any of these constituent parts would wreck the complex
relation which is reason. But such apparently is not the case. The
organization remains whether the material parts come or go (p.
449). Reason presumably would remain, though the worlds below
it should disappear. This independence constitutes its freedom.
Yet such a doctrine is directly counter to Realism's principle of the
dependence of whole on part.
A similar difficulty is involved in Spaulding 's advocacy of
analysis in situ. This is a method by which it is claimed wholes
can be analyzed into parts without falsification. The question
naturally arises : why can not reason be reduced to its elements by
such analysis and subsequently restored to wholeness? Mr. Spaul-
ding would answer apparently that analysis is only inductive and
empirical. Analysis dissects into parts, but is unable to recombine
them and deduce the whole. Accordingly the relation between
higher and lower levels of the real can only be discovered empirically
154 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
(p. 449). Against this, it must be contended that there is no induc-
tion without deduction, no analysis without synthesis. Kant's
analytic regressus to presuppositions (a method to which Mr. Spaul-
ding is not inconsiderably indebted) involved no less a transcendental
deduction. Did not Mr. Spaulding himself apply his analytic
method to deductive purposes, his argument would come to naught.
Only by assuming the conclusions of his inductive analyses to be
deductions is he able to claim their universal validity. Mere
analysis, for instance, could not show universal causation to be a self-
refuting concept. Though the presupposition of causation is free-
dom, so far as analysis goes the presupposition (freedom) and the
conclusion (causation) are independent. Freedom and causation
simply belong to different loci of the real. Analysis would have no
right to deduce a necessary connection between the two; nor could
there be any sense in holding that one contradicts the other. Only
when supplemented by deduction, does analysis become adequate to
the study of the real.
Lastly then, Spaulding can not prove the independence of reason
from its development by citing empirical evidence for non-causal
relations. It is true that the methods and results of the exact sci-
ences furnish instances of relations other than causal; while by
analysis in situ entities are studied in isolation from their historical
setting with apparent success. But empirical induction from a
finite number of cases can never achieve deductive certainty.
Further, the method of analysis in situ or ideal elimination can
never attain complete truth because it overlooks the unreality of
abstraction. Consciousness has a certain psychological power of
free postulation, by which it can ignore its own origin (p. 457) and
assume things "as if" they were different than they are. This
psychological indeterminism is the basis of analysis in situ. But
reason knows well enough that the change or withdrawal of parts
in a real whole never leaves the whole unaffected. To overlook the
unreality of abstraction and to accept hypothetical freedom is to
fall back on the play of imagination and indeterminism. It is to
ignore the self-affirmative power of the mind which is the true
nature of freedom. Our conclusion is that Spaulding has failed to
show that reason is independent of determination by its historical
development. Freedom in this sense is found to lack the objective
and logical foundation which reason demands.
But Mr. Spaulding claims freedom of reason of another kind:
viz., reason is free to follow the implicative structure of reality.
Eeason must be free, because only on this assumption can we explain
its peculiar function of discovering implications (p. 392). "The
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 155
function of discovering implications is reason's peculiar quale"
(p. 393). The performance of this function involves more than an
acceptance of bondage to the objective order. Though reason acts
"in accordance" with the characteristics of objects at a certain level,
it is never causally determined by a necessity in the objects. Reason
is only "inherently determined" by its own nature. For Realism,
this amounts to saying that reason is determined by its own free
power of indeterminism. For the nature of reason seems to con-
sist in freedom to postulate and to shift at will from one universe of
discourse to another. Behind reasoning and its objects remains the
psychological freedom to postulate and to choose, just as behind
sense-data is presupposed the selective activity of perception.
Hence although all mention of subjectivity is ruled out, the principle
of psychological indeterminism guides reason in its discovery of
implications in reality.
The limited scope of implication in the objective order requires
the assumption of indeterminism as a supplementary principle.
' ' Implication . . . seems to subsist between some propositions, but not
. . . among all" (p. 413). Threads of objective necessity do not hold
throughout the universe. Truth is one system, according to Spauld-
ing, only in the sense that it is composed of consistent truths; and
consistency means no more than the "givenness of the co-presence"
of truths together (p. 490). Truths are not necessarily implicative
or constitutive of each other (pp. 427^428). Hence where threads
of implication break down, reason would seem obliged to fall back
on a principle of groundless selection in choosing a new universe of
discourse. Indeterminism would be called in to supplement im-
plication.
The discovery of indeterminism at the root of reason, as repre-
sented by Spaulding, makes it impossible to say why the relation
between reasoning and its objects should not be entirely arbitrary.
If the terms of the relation are subject to free postulation and selec-
tion, what reason can there be for the relation itself remaining uni-
form in different cases? Spaulding himself holds empirical analysis
to have shown the relation between knowledge and its object to be
one of functional correlation. But an empirical method can not
furnish conclusive evidence. At the most, it only gives probability
based on the number of particular cases examined. A multitude of
other relations might subsist in other cases, or even fail to be brought
to light in the cases examined. Again it is primarily a negative
method. By showing the apparent impossibility of the causal rela-
tion in a given instance, the presence of the functional relation is
thereby wrongly assumed to be proved.
156 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
Moreover, Realism has failed to prove the independence of knowl-
edge and its object. Realism's central doctrine of independence is
based upon the ''solution" which it offers of the ego-centric predica-
ment. The "solution" is successful in exposing the fallacy of cer-
tain idealists, who argue from the fact that everything known is in
relation to consciousness, to the conclusion that consciousness is
solely constitutive of the real. But thereupon Realism in turn
commits the same fallacy only drawing the opposite conclusion.
The realist's error likewise consists in identifying relation with
presence to consciousness; only he concludes that by a withdrawal
of consciousness, knowledge and its object can be shown to be inde-
pendent. Realism, being itself guilty of the ego-centric fallacy,
thereby invalidates its proof of the independence of cognition and
the object. Narrowed to rational knowledge, this means that reason-
ing has not been shown to be independent of the object reasoned
about.
Finally, we may return to the first sense in which Spaulding
claimed the freedom of reason: viz., that reason is law-abiding.
According to our findings, the reason represented by the New
Rationalism lacks the principle of logical self-determination or law
within itself. It is not law-abiding in any true sense, because it is
not rationally determined through itself. Indeterminism is every-
where the presupposition of reason. It is represented as reason's
essential nature. Not only is it necessary in the discovery of im-
plications, but where implication breaks down indeterminism is called
in to choose new postulates for reason. Secondly, Realism has de-
stroyed all possible autonomy or unity of reason through its sharp
division of the acts from the objects of reason. Reason is divided
into two independent series; while within these series, each term is
independent of every other. Such endless pluralism arising from
the realist's distinction between the acts and objects of reason must
prove fatal to any conception of a unified, self-determined freedom.
Lastly, the realist can not hold reason to be law-abiding because for
him it is never a completely implicative whole, and hence never
truly ' ' self -afiirming. " Though he may point out that reason fol-
lows the law of its own positive peculiarities, this is not the same as
determination by itself as a whole, which is freedom. For the
realist, reason can never have true autonomy or self-determination
because it can never be a completely implicative system. Implica-
tion always breaks down at some point; hence the laws of reason
flow either from certain peculiarities of the parts or from a fountain
of indeterministic psychical activity introduced as a vis a tergo.
Our conclusion is that the reason represented in Mr. Spaulding 's
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 157
Realism can never have autonomy or freedom as a universal prin-
ciple. The truth of this follows from the fact that reason is never
recognized by him as a completely implicative or self-affirming whole.
According to Realism, the freedom of reason rests upon the claimed
discovery of the independence of knowing and the object known.
But a freedom based on independence particularizes reason and de-
fines it by negation. Moreover the very relation of independence
has not been satisfactorily proved by Realism. The only freedom
left in which Realism can take refuge is psychological indeterminism,
a freedom hardly worthy of the New Rationalism.
MARIE T. COLLINS.
WELLS COLLEGE.
A NOTE FOR THE HISTORY OF AFFECTIVE PSYCHOLOGY
IN the conclusion to Lange 's monograph on the emotions, occurs
the well-known passage on the relation of the emotional life
to the vasomotor system. ' ' It is to the vasomotor system, ' ' he says,
"that we owe the whole emotional side of our psychic life, our joys
and our sufferings, our hours of happiness and misery. Were our
sense impressions not strong enough to excite its activity, we should
go indifferently 'and apathetically through life. All impressions
from the outer world would enrich our experience, increase our
knowledge, but would move us neither to joy nor to anger, gloom, or
fear. ' ?1 In his notes to this passage he refers to Spinoza as one who
most closely of his predecessors approached his theory and to
Girolamo Bocalosi, a physiognomist, as a possible second.
There is however in the obscure figure of J. J. Reich, a pupil of
the famous G. E. Stahl, of Halle, an exponent of the close relation
of the affective life of an individual to the condition of his body.
But whereas the theory of Lange makes the vasomotor system the
cause of the emotional phenomena, Reich believes that the emotional
phenomena cause the disturbances in the body, not mere "ex-
pression of emotions," but actual variations in the blood.
At Halle in 1695 Reich submitted to the faculties a dissertation
on the bodily effects of the emotions, Passionibus Animi Corpus
Humani Varie Alterantibus. This piece of work has only the
interest of being curious, and in outlining it here no pretense is made
of having discovered anything of major importance.
It proceeds by a show of deductive accuracy gained through
Theorems and Corollaries, all backed up by legendary examples of
i C. Lange, Die Gemuetslewegungen, 2te Aufl., tr. von H. Kurella, Wuertz-
burg, Kurt Kabitzsch, 1910, p. 79.
158 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
so-called scientific principles. Not only is its method questionable,
but also its physiological and psychological presuppositions. Reich
still believes in the close union of the blood and the soul (Theorem
II.) and in the existence of the pre-Galenic humors (Th. V., XII.,
to XV.). His attitude, however, emphasizes their psychical con-
comitant and he seems to feel himself rather revolutionary in urging
that the soul be considered the cause of all " internally aroused" (quce
in humano corpore db intra fiunt) phenomena. In such cases we shall
see that "the temperament of the body follows the comportment of
the soul" (Ibid.).
Reich's interest in the emotions is the interest of the physician.
"It can be clearly seen," he says, "that man's health and life and
preservation depend primarily on the tranquillity of his soul and
thence upon the even and measured movements of his material
parts, and through these upon the even and measured movements of
the blood and the remaining fluid parts. When these are disturbed,
the whole mechanism of the human body languishes, totters, and is
indeed jeopardized" (Th. II.).
The emotions are the cause of such disturbances. In their train
come many diseases (Th. IV.). Anger has 'been known to cause
dumbness, apoplexy, paralysis, fever, (Th. XXL) and to affect
mother's milk (Th. XXIL.). As an example of some of the effects
of anger he cites a boy whose head was hurt and skull fractured.
The patient was getting along nicely and quite out of danger when
he was moved to anger. "He relapsed into a fever and delirium
with the result that on the fourth day afterwards he departed this
life" (Th. XXIL). The explanation is that the violent commotion
in the soul so increases the circulation of the blood that the cerebral
membrane is inflamed and becomes swollen with both venous and
arterial blood (ibid.). Fear and terror, like anger, also produce
fever and epilepsy (Th. XXVL.). Gloom or depression (tristitia)
has been known to turn the hair white and to produce abortions.
Reich cites the case of a boy whose hair turned white over night
because of the tristitia brought on by a sentence of death (Th.
XXIII.). These emotions are all undeniably harmful. Hope,
faith, and love in contrast are very useful if moderate, "not only in
preserving health but in restoring it. For no passion is harmful
so long as it preserves the equilibrium of the flow of the blood"
(Th. XX.). Yet if love becomes too intense it produces no end
of trouble (Th. XXVII.).
Though the passions themselves -are psychical, some of them have
an undeniably physiological origin, this in spite of the main thesis
of the dissertation. Reich here follows the traditional dichotomy
of approach and withdrawal. All the passions are either an in-
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 159
clination to possess or "unite with" a pleasing object, or an incli-
nation to flee or repel an unpleasing one. It is the latter class
whose physiological origin is the more obvious (Th. VIII.). Again
they may be divided into those passions which are stimulated by a
"strong impression of external things" and those which take their
rise in the habitual inclination of the mind towards certain objects
(Th. IX.). I have not found in Reich's dissertation any statement
of the identity of these two divisions, that is a statement of whether
the "approaching" emotions are the internally aroused and the
"withdrawal" emotions are the externally aroused, or whether
there is no connection at all. One looks for some such statement
since the theorems just summarized are followed by one which says
that the internally aroused emotions are the remote and mediate
causes of disease, whereas the externally aroused are immediate and
proximate (Th. V.). There is no need for a second observation on
Reich's consistency.
Be that as it may, the attitude of the soul towards its objects
determines certain motor effects, such as flight, approach, attack. 2
These motor effects themselves seem to be of two general kinds.
"Either the soul extends the radii of its influence . . . from the
center to he periphery, whereupon the movement becomes greater,
or draws them in from the circumference towards the center, where-
upon the movement is diminished or destroyed for the time being"
(Th. XVI.).
GEORGE BOAS.
NEW YORK.
REVIEWS AND ABSTRACTS OP LITERATURE
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1918-1919. New Series,
Vol. XIX. London : Williams and Norgate. 1919. Pp. 311.
This volume of the Proceedings is smaller than in the years im-
mediately prior, because the symposia, which beginning with the
volume previous to this were printed also separately, are in the case
of this present volume printed only separately. So the Proceedings
of 1918-19 are thus in two volumes, of which only one is the subject
of the present review.
The general impression of these papers, despite their diversity of
titles, is, to the present reviewer at least, one of similarity of mood
and character, hard <to specify, yet felt through all the differences.
They are, more than in previous years, tentative, suggestive, incom-
plete. Paper <after paper seems striving towards something that is
2Cf. Aristotle's De Anima, Bk. III., Ch. VII., 431a.
160 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
glimpsed, yet never quite attained. The idealists are critical of
idealism; the realists, of realism; the Bergsonian complains we are
isolated units save where matter unites us ; and the pessimistic theo-
logian rebukes those who hope for personal immortality. Almost
every contributor seems to be approaching, each in his own peculiar
way, one subject: "What are we to make of the curious fact that
there are many minds, and what do these many minds do when they
severally think about the world, and what may their future be?"
If the best in this volume only rarely reaches up to the level of
the best in the year just preceding, the average level is even higher.
One paper, Dean Inge's characterization of Platonism, full of as-
tonishing phrases that linger in one's memory, rises at the close to
a height scarcely attained elsewhere in either volume. Among the
other papers here, the reviewer is perhaps making invidious distinc-
tions if he specially recommends John Laird's and J. B. Baillie's
keen and constructive criticisms of certain types of idealistic argu-
ment, and the interesting angle from which A. E. Heath surveys
"the scope of the scientific method." But this is to discriminate
against others almost equally good : the able effort of A. P. Shand
to link up value-theory with his own profound analysis of the emo-
tions; or C. D. Broad's critique of the mechanical and the teleolog-
ical, which adds one more to the series of acute studies of special
problems which he has recently been giving us, each handled with a
sanity and originality most refreshing and attractive. It must be
said of this last paper that, for once, Mr. Broad's scientific appa-
ratus seems unnecessarily cumbersome and pretentious for the result
achieved, but the closing pages are eminently worth while.
If we have so far left unmentioned the Presidential Address by
G. E. Moore, dt was that it might serve as a text for a special dis-
course. The address stands in remarkable contrast with the notable
paper by Bertrand Russell, which opens the above-mentioned sym-
posium volume. They represent, apparently, two tendencies already
latent in an unstable compound we were calling, a while back, by
the name New Realism. Since those happy days of innocence and
epistemological monism, when things called selves knew directly
other things physical, called tables and brickbats, and knew also
things mathematical, such as two and three, and liked the latter
rather better, but granted them all an equal reality, since those
happy days, Mr. Russell has come far. Some parts of him have, it
would seem, come faster than others, so that pieces of him may still
be caught lingering at various points along the road. But as the
' ' real Mr. Russell ' ' has been found to be only an artificial construct,
we should not, perhaps, be too much shocked by this disintegration.
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 161
Meanwhile Mr. Moore has stayed at home ; but owing to the fact that
he has employed his time in picking the family mansion to pieces, he
is now almost <as much "abroad" as Mr. Russell.
Mr. Russell has been through a wide orbit, traversing a region
somewhere between Berkeley and Leibniz. You looked for him in
the same quarter of the heavens where you looked for the idealists ;
only you did not dare to call him that, for Mr. Russell long ago
committed himself, in print, to the opinion that idealists are a con-
temptible lot, and Mr. Russell never changes his moral judgments,
for they are subjective, and therefore within his control. So when
he flashed upon a novel thought, the thought that all that is, is idea,
he did not use any such tainted language to express it ; but told us,
instead, that all that is, is "a six-dimensional manifold of perspec-
tives of sensibilia. " A physical thing is the sum of its appearances
in the various perspectives, only in certain xBases nobody is there to
see a number of these appearances. Indeed, Mr. Russell seems to
have recently discovered that in no case is anybody there to see.
That a thing is to be considered as nothing but the sum of its ap-
pearances, is what Mr. Moore, in the volume we are here reviewing,
denominates the Mill-Russell theory of objects. The ordinary no-
tion of object is wrong, according to Mr. Russell, because when two
.people look at the same object, what one sees is not what the other
sees, therefore there is no same object. Hence each experiencer is, at
,any moment, living in a world all his private own, his own momen-
tary perspective. But how did the two people ever find this out?
How did they even ever suppose they were looking at the same ob-
ject, if they are thus shut within themselves? Mr. Russell's premise
says they looked at the same object and thus discovered an interest-
ing discrepancy. From this, Mr. Russell draws the conclusion that
his premise is not true. Had Mr. Russell, in the old days, found, in
an idealist book, anything like this conclusion that destroys its own
premise, he would have hailed with delight such a self-refutation of
idealism. Meanwhile Mr. Russell might have been forgiven the way
he arrives at the Mill-Russell theory, if only he had used it as a
scientist would use an hypothesis, working it for all it was worth,
deducing with precision all its consequences. But it must be con-
lessed that, so far, we have had from him, concerning perspectives
and Mill-Russell objects, only some confusedly intuitionist and
cavalierly unscientific expositions, plus a promise that some day Mr.
A. N. Whitehead will supply us with precise details.
But Mr. Russell's orbit has now swept him along into a new
region. He has become a behaviorist. He has dropped the epistem-
ological subject. He dallies with William James's theory, that the
162 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
Cental and the physical are two different ways in which the same
things are put together. He has adopted almost everything we had
been accustomed to associate with American New Realism. Whether
the cometary tail of his theory of perspectives, which he still pulls
along behind him, will survive in this new atmosphere, remains to
be seen. For behaviorism has meant, to those who held it hitherto,
the right to start with a common world, a common world which, in
some sense, endures through time, and in which we all move about.
The structure of this common world is not reducible to its qualities,
and it is by means of the structure that we come to compare quali-
ties. You and I may disagree as to whether the house-door is red or
yellow. But I know we are discussing the same door, for you use it
to enter the house the same as I, and do not attempt to walk through
the blank wall. Mr. Russell would probably characterize these re-
marks as rather crude ; but he long ago said, and wisely, that in such
matters the crude view is often nearest right. But in any case the
fact remains, that American realists have clung to behaviorism, even
to the brink of a radical materialism, precisely because they felt it
to be the road of objectivism, the road away from Berkeley and from
Leibniz. We await with interest Mr. Russell's future synthesis of
incompatibles.
While Mr. Russell has thus been exploiting the idealist and sub-
jectivist tendency in epistemological monism, Mr. Moore has been
leaning the other way ; with the consequence that now he seems about
to topple over into epistemological dualism, much to his own disgust ;
so that the paper before us is composed of a series of violent contor-
tions performed on the ragged edge, wherein Mr. Moore is trying
desperately to keep his balance and not fall over the line.
Mr. Moore is seriously worried over what it is I see when I see
an inkstand. What surprises us in Mr. Moore, is that he here shows
himself alarmed by those same old bogies which we had supposed all
new realists, as part of their initiation into the arcana of the sect,
had lon^ since unmasked and exorcized. What I see, as the ink-
stand, looks different when I put on blue glasses; therefore what I
see can not be part of the inkstand. Now surely, in so far as we can
clearly distinguish thus between the inkstand that is, and the ink-
stand that appears, surely there is, so far, no reason for denying
we know the inkstand that is. The possibility of making the dis-
tinction is also the possibility of rising above it. The trouble is that
a next move is then introduced, to the effect that both cases are
merely two cases of the inkstand that appears, and some inkstand
that really is, lies yonder beyond and unreachable. But if there is
to be any such second move, it ought rather to be a criticism of the
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 163
inkstand that appears, a criticism which points out that this ink-
stand has as much right, not as little right, to be called the real
inkstand as has the other. If it looks "blue under certain circum-
stances, then it is the real inkstand that looks blue, there is only
one inkstand involved. Indeed you must say that under these cir-
cumstances it simply is blue. The phrase ' ' looks blue ' ' merely calls
our attention to the fact that there are peculiar circumstances.
There is no more puzzle about the real inkstand being both blue
and not blue, the one in one context, the other in another, than there
is in the same piece of gold leaf 'being yellow in reflected light and
green in transmitted light, though the place where I see the yellow
and where I see the green is one and the same place. So also, the same
inkstand is moving or not moving, according as you choose your axes
of reference ; heavy or light, according as you consider its potential
gravitational acceleration towards the earth or towards the moon.
We deal in each and all these cases with physical effects of physical
caiuses; there is no need for, and no meaning in, lugging into the
discussion any references to any realm of the subjective or the
mental.
But perhaps Mr. Moore would still feel that this was not meeting
his difficulty. He might even suspect that we were thus merely com-
ing to the Mill-Russell theory from another angle. We are calling
the little 'blue something in one set of circumstances the same thing
as the big white something in another set. It is like the jack-knife
that was still the same old knife after it had had new blades sub-
stituted for the old ones, and also a new handle. What do we mean
by "the same"? Or again, the scientist tells us that this same solid
inkstand is about as "full of empty space" as is the starry sky,
lonely electrons wandering afar from one another. On^e more, what
in this sameness in .things so different 1 There would seem to be no
way of avoiding the conclusion that "the same with" means "stand-
ing in a specific relation to, ' ' and that the ' ' thing ' ' of naive realism
must be dissolved into a relational system. In so far, the Mill-
Russell theory is right.
Where the Mill-Russell theory turns the situation upside down,
is when it assumes the elements of the relational system are given
data, to be identified with the various "appearances of the thing,"
but the system itself is constructed by us, so that a perspective is
simpler than the common world, which common world is made out
of perspectives. Surely this is to reverse the logical priority. An
appearance of something, such as how the inkstand just now looks to
me, is one of the most complex .parts of the total thing-system, 'being
the composite resultant, the summed effects, of a most complicated
164 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
tangle of causes. Its apparent simplicity vanishes the instant you
try to make it a starting-point for inference. It is therefore exceed-
ingly undesirable that we begin with such a given block datum as
the center of our theory of a thing-system. No analysis can break
up such a datum into suitable elements by direct attack; no infer-
ence can be safely based on it as a unit.
Perhaps an analogy will bring out the character of the situation.
The given datum of astronomy is the easily observed circular move-
ment of the heavens. Building on this datum, we should naturally
arrive, almost at a single 'bound, at something like the Ptolemaic
astronomy. And of course Ptolemaic astronomy is theoretically
possible : you can take the earth as the center, and any orbit of any
heavenly body can be mathematically resolved into a system of
circular motions relative to this center. And we may grant the
Russell theory of perspectives exactly the same type of theoretical
possibility. But Copernican astronomy, in this respect quite con-
trary to Ptolemaic, runs violently in the face of what seems the very
evidence of the senses. It declares the motions of the stars are not
simply what they seem to be, but the appearance of the heavens to
the observer on the earth must be interpreted as the resultant of a
great complex of factors. Yet the Copernican astronomy has pre-
vailed. It has prevailed because of a certain objective simplicity;
while the snarl of Ptolemaic epicycle on epicycle made that astron-
omy utterly unmanageable.
Mr. Russell, in his theory of perspectives, would start, like
Ptolemaic astronomy, with the given mass-impression. He is at one
with the traditions of British empiricism in clinging to the given
datum ; logician though he is, he fears to venture forth into any sea
of speculation where thought is one's compass and guide. The real
is the verified and the verified is always quality given, hard, stub-
born, uncontaminated. So he would take a now given, unanalyzed,
three-dimensional appearance, and put it along with other similar,
and supposedly somewhere given appearances, to form a three- or
four-dimensional manifold, which has three-dimensional manifolds
for elements. He would thus try to arrive at a common world by
construction. He pursues this cumbersome method because he wants
to start from, and keep close to, what is indubitably given. Genetic
psychology insinuates a doubt as to the immediacy with which any
one perspective is given as ordered in three dimensions, but he puts
such suggestions aside as illegitimate, for this might knock out the
only solid starting-point he has, and then where would he be?
But even though we grant to his method a certain sort of theoretical
possibility ; we must insist that its claim to superior certainty is un-
justified. At the first move it makes, it has already transcended the
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 165
given, and possibly transcended it in a way as rash, as the first
inference of the naive spectator beholding the march of the stars,
who jumps to the conclusion, almost forced on him -by his senses
themselves, that obviously he is the center around which the universe
revolves. Mr. Russell seems to forget that what is near to the in-
dubitable may be exceedingly dubious.
It is more desirable that we start with assuming the common
world, and explain, for instance, the appearance of the inkstand,
as due, one factor in it to one set of causes, another factor in it to
another set of causes. We thus 'build up the given datum, and not
the world. "We arrive at the given at the end of our thought-process,
and do not begin with it. Of course, as always happens when we
start with what are in the order of knowledge hypotheses no one
given datum can ever be a complete verification of our theory. But
what we, in the order of knowledge, are feeling after by hypotheses,
is, in the order of nature, not hypothesis nor knowledge, but the
common world itself. And we may fairly assume that science brings
us into the closest contact we have with that world. And so we feel
justified in taking the inkstand as it is thought of by science, not as
being more nor less real than any of the ways it appears to the senses,
but as being more properly the suitable center and starting-point,
the key-position, from which to grasp the structure of that system
which we call ''one thing. " We feel justified in starting this with
the common-world. Why? Because it is more probable, from the
standpoint of any really sound logic, that a common-world exists,
and that the other minds are thinking therein, than it is that I saw
a blue inkstand half a, minute ago, or see one ten feet away from me
now, and Mr. Russell in his heart of hearts knows that this is so.
H. T. COSTELLO.
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY.
JOURNALS AND NEW BOOKS
REVUE DE METAPHYSIQUE ET DE MORALE. July-
August, 1919. Correspondence inedite de A. Spir. Lettres a A.
Penjon (pp. 425-441): A. SPIR. -^ These letters contain comments
explanatory of certain points in Spir's idealistic metaphysics. The
ideality of time, the status of the finite self, and the relation of the
Absolute to our knowledge are among the topics discussed. L'idee
du neant et le probleme de I'origine radicale dans le neoplatonisme
grec (pp. 443-475) : E. BBEHiER.-The "negative theology" of Neo-
Platonism is significant not only because of its discovery that Reality
is ultimately indescribable, but also as an attempt to deal with the
166 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
problem of ultimate origin. In attacking this problem the Greek
neo-platonists distinguish between two kinds of non-being; a non-
being which implies simply negative predication, and a non-being
which is freed from all limitation by reason of its complete inde-
terminism, and may be considered superior to and the source of all
being. The neo-platonic doctrines concerning or 'Ev are considered
as an attempt to describe this second kind of non-being. The views
of Plotinus, Proclus, and Damascius are discussed. L' attitude re-
ligieuse de Jesuit es et le sources du pari de Pascal (pp. 447-616)
A suivre. : L. BDANCHET. - With a view to effective proselytizing the
Jesuits tried to adjust their religious position to the spirit of
Humanism and Renaissance science. Pascal, as a thorough Jan-
senist mystic, opposed their concessions to rationalism in theology
and to naturalism in ethics. But Pascal's famous pragmatic argu-
ment for belief is of Jesuit origin, and is to be found in the work of
Pere Sirmond, Immortalite de L'Ame. This apparent paradox is a
subject of dissussion in the next issue of the Revue, where this
article is completed. Notes et Discussions. A propos de la Demon-
stration Geometrique. Reponse a M. Goblot (pp. 517-521) : L.
ROUGIER. -L. Rougier criticizes M. Goblot for " geometrical empiri-
cism, ' ' since he makes geometrical demonstration depend upon spatial
intuition in the examination of concrete figures. A propos du
Fondement de L'Induction (pp. 523-527): S. GINZBERG. - The
principle of the uniformity of nature is the basis for inductive
method. Royce's doctrine of induction based on "a fair sampling
of instances" is seen to imply this principle. Questions Pratiques.
Reflexions sur le Droit de la Paix et la Societe des Nations (pp.
529-568): R. HUBERT. -An attempt made in the closing months
of the war to set forth the essential conditions of a permanent peace.
Such a peace must be based upon "right" or justice, which means
respecting individual and collective personalities. With this
premise in mind the questions of territorial claims, reparation, and
a "society of nations" are considered. The latter is essential to
secure international justice.
Taussig, P. W. Free Trade, the Tariff and Reciprocity. New York :
The Macmillan Co. 1920. Pp. ix -f 219.
Trotter, W. The Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War (Revised
and enlarged). New York: The Macmillan Co. 1920. Pp. 264.
Turner, J. B. An Examination of William James's Philosophy: A
Critical Essay for the General Reader. Oxford : B. H. Blackwell.
1919. Pp. vii -f- 76. 4 s. 6 d.
Woodburne, Angus Stewart. The Relation between Religion and
Science: A Biological Approach. Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press. 1920. Pp. 103. $.75 net.
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 167
Ziehen, Th. Lehrbuch der Logik, auf positivistischer Grundlage mit
Beriicksichtigung der Geschichte der Logik. Bonn: A. Marcus
& E. Webers Verlag. 1920. Pp. 866. Br. M. 47.50. Geb. in
Ganzleinen M. 55.50; Halbfranz M. 59.50.
NOTES AND NEWS
THE following is the preliminary announcement of the plans for
this year 's meeting of the Western Philosophical Association :
The next annual meeting will be held at the University of Wis-
consin, Madison, Wis., on Friday and Saturday, April 16-17, 1920.
The afternoon session of Friday will be devoted to a considera-
tion of the question, "What May Philosophy Contribute to the
Further Development of the Social Sciences?" Members are
urged to present papers on this topic and to cooperate toward
securing a fruitful and pointed discussion of it.
One session will be set aside for papers on logical and epistemo-
logical issues ; another will provide for papers on any other philo-
sophical subjects which members may desire to discuss.
Arrangements are under way for a luncheon on Saturday, to
be followed by an informal meeting at which, without prearranged
programme, members may bring forward for general discussion
any matters of common interest.
The prospects as regards attendance are unusually gratifying
and, in connection with inquiries that have come regarding the
meeting, five papers have already been offered. Those wishing
to present papers are therefore requested to communicate the
titles to the Secretary at the earliest possible date. It is of im-
portance that our time limit of twenty minutes be carefully ob-
served. Abstracts of all papers should be in the hands of the
Secretary not later than April 1st.
EDWARD L. SCHAUB,
Secretary-Treasurer.
EVANSTON, ILL.,
February 23, 1920
\
A MEETING of the Aristotelian Society was held on January 19th,
Professor Wildon Carr, vice-president, in the chair. Professor J. A.
Smith read a paper on * ' The Philosophy of Giovanni Gentile, ' ' which
began with a general characterization of the remarkable re^birth of
idealistic philosophy in Southern Italy. That philosophy, as exem-
plified in the systems of Croee and Gentile, builds up the foundation
168 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
}
of history, which it conceives of as the content of experience self-
created by the mind that seeks the theory of it. The special problem
now before philosophy is the understanding of history, and imprimis
of its own history. An endeavor was made to trace the stages in the
formation of Gentile's thought its gradual enlargement from a
theory of education into a universal metaphysics. This development
culminates in the assertion of the identity of mind's essence with its
existence ; it is the process of its own gradual self-creation. The doc-
trine that mind is atto puro is taken and employed by Gentile as the
guiding principle of a new form of absolute idealism. As compared
with Croce he insists more upon the unity of mind or spirit, while
recognizing certain absolute forms of it as issuing from it and con-
stituting its concrete being or filling. Philosophy is the supreme
form of self-consciousness, and so finds in itself the clue to all that
mind is or has created itself and its world. This principle, once
accepted, applies itself and advances by an immanent dialectic. No
reality outside mind and its activity is needed to account for ex-
perience. The paper concluded with an attempt to render the central
idea of Gentile 's philosophy more familiar, and to meet a few objec-
tions to its apprehension and acceptance.
THE Revista di Filosofia Neo-scolastica announces in a recent num-
ber that its competition for the best essay on the philosophical and
theological doctrines of Dante has been extended to January 31, 1921.
A notice of this competition and the rules governing the writing and
submission of the essays appeared in this JOURNAL, Vol. XVI., p. 84
(January 30, 1919).
PROFESSOR WILMON H. SHELDON, of Dartmouth, has been ap-
pointed professor of philosophy at Yale to succeed Professor A. K.
Rogers. Professor Rogers is retiring from active work, but will con-
tinue to live in New Haven and devote himself to writing.
DEAN C. E. SEASHORE, of the University of Iowa, delivered a lec-
ture on "The Psychology of Musical Talent" at the University of
Kansas on March 1, 1920.
PROFESSOR WOODBRIDGE RILEY, of Vassar College, is sailing for
France to deliver a course of lectures at the Sorbonne upon "Rep-
resentative Americans" Franklin and Jefferson, Walt Whitman,
Lincoln, Roosevelt and William James.
VOL. XVII. No. 7, MARCH 25, 1920
THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS
THE PRESENT SITUATION IN PHILOSOPHY 1
A MERICAN students of philosophy should take a lively interest
-^~ in the inaugural lecture of Professor Kemp Smith at the
University of Edinburgh. After sojourning some thirteen years or
more in the United States, during which time he was professor of
his subject at Princeton University, our friend and colleague was
elected to succeed Professor Pringle-Pattison, and on assuming the
responsibilities of his chair, chose, as the theme of his inaugural
address, "The Present Situation in Philosophy." It is one of the
most interesting and one of the most perplexing topics. Any sym-
pathetic analysis of it just now should help to bring about that
more generous appreciation of human problems which ought to go
along with a more generously social orientation, and a better under-
standing of history. This most recent examination is very sym-
pathetic and admirably candid; it ought to be widely read and
thoroughly discussed.
Such a discussion should, the present reviewer believes, begin
with a new orientation. We do not quarrel with Dante or with
Saint Francis, and we should not do so with Plotinus or with
Hegel. Great imaginative traditions are a human possession that
most Americans little appreciate, cut off, as they are, from the
world of art in which those traditions have found perhaps their
most appropriate expression. The idealizing imagination has 'been
wrought into a system by a succession of noble thinkers. The sub-
stance of that system is no less of the imagination, its real concern
is no less serious because we call it metaphysics and dispute, often
quite provincially, about details of evidence and dialectic. Idealists
frequently insist, and they have every right to do so, upon the
continuity of their doctrine with the greater past. Theirs is after
all a vision, which a lover of Chartres and of Assisi ought to recog-
i An inaugural lecture delivered at the University of Edinburgh on the six-
teenth of October, 1919, by Norman Kemp Smith, Professor of logic and meta-
physics. Edinburgh : James Thin, 54 South Bridge. 1919. Ftp. 31. Reprinted
in full in the Philosophical Review for Jan. 1920 (Vol. XXIX, pp. 1-26).
169
170 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
nize. The lecture gives, however, the old orientation. Let me
summarize as briefly as I can the description it presents.
The history of philosophy shows three current attitudes, skep-
ticism, naturalism, and idealism. The nineteenth century, from
1820 to 1890, influenced by Compte and by Darwin and his fol-
lowers, was a period of skepticism, called at one time agnosticism.
Impressed more and more by the progress of natural science, and
particularly by the new information supplied by anthropology, this
negative attitude gave way to a more affirmative one, based on
positive science, suspicious of the animistic tradition, and culti-
vating an enthusiasm for social reform and progress. This is nat-
uralism. But naturalists leave their own position logically incom-
plete, and they give no just account of "spiritual values." Nat-
uralism when logically completed by epistemology and made ade-
quate to the more intimate aspects of experience becomes idealism,
in which the animistic tradition is renewed and given an interpre-
tation diametrically opposed to that given toy naturalism. The
present-day issue in philosophy is between naturalism and idealism;
in the discussion, naturalism has the advantage on matters of detail
where science is in a position to supply relevant information, but
idealism finds its opportunity and justification in comprehending
life's best achievements and results. This, then, is the present
situation: skepticism grown positive through a greater amount of
information, and merged in naturalism; naturalism, preoccupied
with the conditions and antecedents of living, impressive because of
the achievements of science, but still too negative and self-restricted ;
idealism, speaking for the most significant values of life, and sup-
plementing naturalism's catalogue of the given with a vision of the
desired and the confidently believed.
Professor Kemp Smith has phrased a number of things so
happily that I shall be justified in quoting his own words. "Skep-
ticism must hold a high and worthy place in every history of phi-
losophy by whomsoever written. It has been one of the main
agencies of human advance. It is the enemy of fanaticism and
false sentiment in every form. The mind to which it is utterly un-
congenial can have no capacity for philosophy, and is little likely
to have discrimination in regard to truth." But though valuable
"as a regulating balance wheel," skepticism "can supply no engine
power. When through the miscarriage of positive efforts at recon-
struction error arises, or when beliefs and institutions, justified in
their day and generation, outlive their usefulness and abuses
accumulate, the skeptic is indeed in his element. But when his
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 171
destructive work is completed and the ground is cleared, he is left
without occupation. He is a specialist in the subject of error, and
when the community's stock of error gives out, he is faced by the
specter of unemployment, condemned to idleness until a new crop
has been grown."
Circumstances gave, however, a new lease to skepticism, and
although seeming at first to support an agnostic philosophy they
have in the end led away from it.
11 At the period I refer to, say roughly from about 1820 on-
wards, the Romantic movement, passing from literature into
scholarship and history, awakened a new interest in human life as
lived under conditions different from our own, whether in the Far
East, in classical or in primitive times, and so originated the his-
torical study of civilization in all its manifold forms. This his-
torical method obtained an added prestige from Darwin's applica-
tion of it in the biological sciences; but it had already borne good
fruit prior to the publication of the Origin of Species, and very
soon thereafter was able to systematize its main results through the
creation of the new science of anthropology.
"Now anthropology made possible for the first time an under-
standing of the beginnings in which human thinking takes its rise.
It has shown that primitive thinking, among savage peoples in all
parts of the earth, invariably bases itself upon a distinction between
soul and body, and that it employs this distinction to account for
all those phenomena which most attract its attention, especially the
facts of disease and death. Animism, as is called that is to say,
the animistic distinction (between a body and a soul supposed to be
capable of leaving it in sleep and of surviving it in death is the
cradle of all human thought. It has made possible the first begin-
nings of religion, and has thereby yielded the necessary sanctions
for the moral and social values embodied in custom and in tribal
institutions.
"The conclusions to which the study of primitive thought thus
led were mainly two-fold that animism is false as a theory, and
yet profoundly beneficial as an influence. It is false because the
data upon which the distinction between soul and body is based
have been wrongly interpreted. The asserted facts are either them-
selves fictitious, or, owing to primitive man's ignorance of the
forces at work within and without him, have been misunderstood.
Thus human thought is cradled not in ignorance, but in positive
error and delusion. Its primitive (beliefs rest upon foundations
which, from a logical point of view, are grotesquely incapable of
supporting the superstructure. These beliefs may be reestablished
on other grounds, 'but certainly not on the evidence which originally
led to their adoption."
172 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
But that, as the lecture points out, is only one side of the
picture. Man did make progress. Animism, which was not arbi-
trarily invented but was a natural feature of primitive experience
became socially institutionalized and religion became a social in-
strument. "The communities in which religion appears and takes
root acquire all the advantages of unified action, and are therefore
favored by the processes of natural selection. These services, how-
ever, [the naturalists say] are only temporary. Though they have
proved indispensable in the earlier stage of man's development,
they can not hope to maintain themselves under the altered condi-
tions of a civilization that is scientifically organized."
Thus mythology has been justified over and over again by its
social utility, an observation in harmony with the more crudely
pragmatic interpretation of science. In so far, however, as the
attitude of agnosticism persists, it is because the traditional dis-
tinction between reality and appearance is retained. If it can be
retained, "then more must be made of it, and justification must be
given for our preferential treatment of it. But in that case the
agnosticism is undermined and the way is open for idealistic teach-
ing. This is the line taken by those who employ it in support of
religion. If, on the other hand and this has been the more usual
tendency of the school the distinction between appearance and
reality be allowed to be as relative and empirical as any other,
agnosticism at once reveals its true affiliations. Agnosticism, in its
usual and most influential forms, has really been naturalism in
disguise. ' '
Science has received a skeptical justification not unlike that
granted to religion. "Even science, it was contended, is not a
form of theoretical insight ; it is merely a means to power. Science,
rightly understood, never seeks to explain, but only to simplify.
By scrupulously careful observation we verify the ultimate coexist-
ences and sequences among our sensations, and under the guidance
of elaborate hypotheses, which have a merely subjective value in
directing inquiry, we define the coexistences and sequences in exact
quantitative terms. Acquaintance with these relations, when thus
precisely defined, enables us to predict the future, to construct
machines, and so progressively to gain control over our physical
environment; but they yield no insight, it is maintained, into the
independently real. What is alone truly characteristic of science
ia not the obtaining of insight, but the acquisition of power.
Thought is an instrument developed through natural processes for
the practical purpose of adaptation. Its criteria and values are ex-
clusively determined by the instinctive equipment of the species in
its adjustment to environment. They have no independent validity
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 173
of any kind. The human mind, the argument proceeds, is limited
to appearances; to attain knowledge in the absolute sense, that is
to say through distinguishing (between the true and the false, is im-
possible. There is a mechanism, or economy of human thought;
but logic, so-called, is a science with pretensions as excessive and
quite as unfounded as those of theology. The distinction between
the true and the false claims to be an absolute one; and how can
man, a merely natural existence, expect to have dealings with the
absolute in any form?" What the history of philosophy reveals is
not "a progressive discovery of truth, but a gradual emancipation
from error," and agnosticism is for the naturalist "itself a com-
promise between science and animism. " " The dualism between the
phenomenal and the real, upon which agnosticism bases itself, is
the last survival of those many dualisms which owe their origin to
the primitive distinction between soul and body. With the total
elimination of all dualistic distinctions, agnosticism likewise
vanishes and we are then for the first time left with a thorough-
going and completely consistent creed the creed which is pro-
gressively strengthened by every advance in science, namely,
naturalism. ' '
But that is the negative side of naturalism. On its constructive
side, "what distinguishes naturalism is its more sympathetic atti-
tude towards animistic beliefs on their practical side. For as I
have already suggested, naturalism has ceased to be exclusively
interested in physical and cosmological problems. As a philosophy,
it now rests its main hopes on the medical, psychological, and social
sciences; and from the recent developments of these sciences it has,
like idealism, learned many lessons, especially as regards the prom-
inent part played in practical life by instinct and the emotions. It
recognizes that in virtue of our instinctive equipment we have pro-
found idealizing tendencies, and that one of our fundamental needs
is that of devoting our energies to some end more enduring and
wider than our own personal well-being. And it also recognizes
what is so abundantly evident in the light of history that until a
social movement takes on an emotional character, and indeed be-
comes a religious crusade that can regard itself as directed against
the powers of darkness, it can never be genuinely popular and
secure the adhesion of the masses of men. Accordingly naturalism
has in recent times more and more expounded itself in the form of
an enthusiastic, humanitarian, and indeed Utopian creed, with an
ethics emotionally charged by the harsher impulses of hatred and
indignation as well as by the softer sentiments of love and pity."
Naturalism has begun to formulate its own theory of ethics and to
invade that domain of "spiritual interests" over which idealism
174 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
watches so carefully. It "has all the more seriously to 'be reckoned
with that it is no longer exclusively intellectualistic in its interests
and outlook, but endeavors to organize a type of civilization and of
religion in harmony with itself, and can provide a programme that
may guide us in the supreme and ultimate choices of our prac-
tical life."
And now I reach a passage that, frankly, I do not understand.
Naturalism shows, Professor Kemp Smith tells us, in its most recent
expositions, "an eagerness to come into line with the idealistic view
that the logical criteria have absolute validity, that knowledge is
really knowledge, that is to say a form of genuine insight, reveal-
ing to us the independent real." Does the writer have in mind
American neo-realism, and its loyalty to the logic of Mr. Bertrand
Russell? Some things in Mr. Russell's writings are not altogether
clear, but on one point he is quite unambiguous, and that is that
logical inferences, as such, have and can have no existential im-
plications. However, neo-realism has two features which, might
lead the lecturer to identify it as naturalism; it was inspired by
science and its polemic was chiefly against idealism. Or does he
refer to remnants of subjectivism that are to be found in Pro-
fessor Karl Pearson's Grammar of Science f In any case, whether
they be pragmatists or not, naturalists do not admit that a log-
ical demonstration is a merely temperamental series of convic-
tions. The validity they claim for logic is, however, only a log-
ical validity, that is, formal consistency, a technique of putting
two and two together, and which remains a technique. But how-
ever that may be, this claim of "validity" for logical distinctions
is, we are told, a claim that both naturalists and idealists agree in
making, and here, with the resources of epistemology, the transi-
tion to idealism is made. "For why, it may be asked, should the
conclusion that science is really science, revealing to us the in-
dependently real, be regarded by idealism as so vitally important,
especially when what science teaches seems to place so many ob-
stacles in the way of an idealistic philosophy, and seems indeed,
if anything, to favor naturalism?
"To these questions there is a two-fold reply. In the first place
the supreme concern of idealism is to show that the aesthetic and
spiritual values have a more than merely human significance; and
there is apparently not the least hope of so doing if the values that
hold in the intellectual domain can not be substantiated as possess-
ing objective validity. If you will pardon the seeming truism, it
is the very purpose of knowledge to know. If knowledge is itself a
deception, and its conclusions are merely practical devices for tem-
porary adaptation, forcing belief independently of demonstration,
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 175
there can be no hope of vindicating for the other values in life any
superhuman significance. The genuineness of scientific knowledge
must therefore be regarded as one of the main supporting pillars of
an idealistic philosophy. Idealism can not afford to be obscurant-
ist; it may legitimately in certain circumstances be skeptical as to
whether or not a theory has been scientifically established; but
should it attack science it will .be undermining its own foundations.
"But there is also a second reason why idealism welcomes, as no
small advance towards eventual agreement, the recognition by nat-
uralism of the absolute validity of the logical criteria. If, as ideal-
ism maintains, intellectual and spiritual values stand on the same
plane of objectivity, and therefore justify parity of treatment, half
the battle is won when the human mind, its natural history not-
withstanding, is allowed to be capable of transcending not only its
subjective but even its planetary limitations. That the human
mind should possess the power of comprehending its own natural
origins, and of ranging in what we call thought over the entire
material universe, of which, as an animal existence, it is so minor
and transitory a product, is, in the view of idealism, a fact of such
central and supreme significance, that agreement in regard to it,
must, in consistency, bring other important consequences in its
train. And this, indeed, is why the problem of knowledge some-
what to the bewilderment of the outsider in philosophy has always
bulked so prominently in idealist systems. The specific results of
the natural sciences, taken by themselves and so far as they go,
may support naturalism no less than idealism, and perhaps on the
whole can be regarded as favoring naturalism I should myself be
willing to make this admission yet the fact that science exists at
all, that the human mind has proved capable of acquiring it, when
taken with the other achievements of the human spirit, in the arts,
in the moral, social, and religious life, outweighs in philosophical
significance, and sets in a very different perspective, the conclusions
reached exclusively through study of man's physical conditions."
And idealism sees in animism not merely a trail of error more
and more in contradiction with what we know. It asks to what
extent have aministic beliefs stood the test of later experience?
"And judging them by this criterion, idealism is prepared to main-
tain that, so far are the dualisms in which animism has issued from
being the main source of error in philosophy, on the contrary only
through repetition of the distinctions to which they direct our at-
tention can human life be rightly understood. Primitive man's
distinction between the body and its ghostly duplicate is simply the
first crude formulation of that later distinction between the phys-
ical and the psychical which in one form or another we are bound
176 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
to accept as fundamental." "Animism is indeed the cradle of
human thought; and what most surprises upon study of it is not
the extent and perversity of its false beliefs, but, allowing for its
necessary limitations and defects, the extraordinarily sound appre-
ciation which it displays for those distinctions which reach deepest
and best stand the test of more developed experience."
As for the questions at issue 'between naturalism and idealism,
''they are opposed on one fundamental conviction. According to
naturalism, parts of the universe are more complex and are more
completely unified than is the universe as a whole. Certain parts,
too, possess higher qualities, such as life and consciousness, which
are not to be found in the wider reality that includes them. That
is to say, when we sample reality, parts are found to be superior to
the whole. The Universe is, as it were, merely the stage, and is
not itself a center of interest; what alone signify are the episodes
that happen in this or that part of it.
"Idealism, on the other hand, is committed to the assertion that
the Universe is at once richer and more highly unified than any of
its parts. And as man is the most complex existence known to us,
it is upon the clues supplied by our superficially human experience
that idealism bases its ultimate conclusions. For though man can,
indeed, be studied only in his natural setting, for an understanding
of his nature and destiny idealism refers us to that wider reality
which is depicted in poetry and the arts, and worshiped in religion,
and which, though not yet scientifically known, can be philosoph-
ically discerned as conferring upon human life its standards and
values.
"This main cleavage of opinion determines all the other differ-
ences between naturalism and idealism. Naturalism finds in mat-
ter, or at least in the non-conscious, the groundwork of reality;
idealism finds in spiritual values the key to ultimate problems.
Naturalism has to treat human values as merely relative; idealism
interprets them as disclosing a richer and more comprehensive uni-
verse than can yet be defined in scientific terms. ' '
And in conclusion the opposition is thus restated. ' ' In the view
of a naturalistic philosophy, man is a 'being whose capacities, even
in their highest activities, are intelligible only as exercised exclu-
sively in subordination to the specific requirements of his terrestrial
environment. For the student of the humanities, on the other
hand, man is adapted, indeed, to his environment, but measures
himself against standards for which it can not account. He is not
a piece of nature's mechanism, but himself a microcosm, prefig-
uring in his art, in his moral codes and social institutions, and in
religion, the wider reality to which as a finite being he can have no
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 177
more direct method of approach. His true self-knowledge is made
possible by values and standards that constitute his humanity in
distinction from the animals; and it is by their absoluteness that
they deliver him from the limitations of strictly animal existence."
II
I have tried in the above passages to give the writer's point of
view and to illustrate the quality of his thought. One must re-
member the occasion and its amenities, the deference toward a dis-
tinguished predecessor. "It is well," the writer says, "when suc-
ceeding generations are bound together by respect and reverence."
And, "The teacher of philosophy stands to his students in a rela-
tion of greater delicacy than does the teacher of any other subject
in the University curriculum." Professor Pringle-Pattison al-
ways demanded, we are told by his successor, that every problem
should be faced in all its difficulties, and we do not need Professor
Kemp Smith's assurance to know that he aims to follow his pre-
decessor's example in this respect. And since very crucial ques-
tions are suggested by various passages of the lecture I will ask
them as simply as I can.
(A} No doubt skepticism or agnosticism was an anticipation of
naturalism, but the advance from the negative to the more affirm-
ative position was brought about by a great increase in scientific
information. Scientific information, ever more abundant, does not
as yet favor the idealistic interpretation, and) does not seem likely
to do so. The passage from naturalism to idealism is accomplished
not so much with the help of science as in spite of it. It is accom-
plished 1 by dialectic. Now what title has dialectic to vouch for a
transition to something that is more than dialectical? The propo-
sitions of idealism, indicated on page 22 of the lecture, are not ex-
periments merely in formal logic, they are surely statements of an
existential sort. But one of the decisive achievements of content
porary philosophy is the recognition that logic is not an existential
science. If that is so, assurances about existence must come from
another source.
For I suppose we may assume that idealism will not appeal to
the tender-minded pragmatism with which James scattered so many
seeds of confusion ; hopes and preferences will not be offered as evi-
dences about the nature of the world. If then existential proposi-
tions are to foe drawn neither from logic alone, nor from the heart,
whence are they to be derived? Unless we admit authority or
revelation no source seems to remain except the source that we con-
stantly use, natural observation, with the help, if need be, of what-
ever technical aids we possess, and of inference tested by continued
178 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
observation and experiment. This, however, gives us the data and
the method of naturalism, and the evidence thus gained is, as Pro-
fessor Kemp Smith so candidly admits, not favorable to idealism.
And that, I suppose, is why idealism follows another and a
more difficult path, that of a dialectical argument which begins
with the presuppositions of epistemology. Those presuppositions
may, of course, be correct; idealism may be right, but we have to
consider here the evidence in the case and the methods we are at
liberty to use. It is easy here to misunderstand and misrepresent.
But the premise of the idealist's dialectic, if I understand, depends
upon a certain conception of knowledge which is valued for that
very subjectivism which naturalism is commended for repudiating.
Knowledge to 'be knowledge must give us the independently real
and the really independent. ''Naturalism, that is to say, can not
explain the fact of knowledge and the employment of logical
criteria, save by allowing to the mind the power of transcending its
subjective limitations and of apprehending from subjectively con-
ditioned data, by means of subjective processes, an objective mean-
ing" (p. 27). It may of course be so; but this way of conceiving
the situation is less 1 characteristic of philosophy to-day than it used
to be. The fact that the point of view exists has its historical ex-
planation, and the impression is abroad that this epistemological
point of view is retained in the interest of epistemology.
(B) Idealism insists that science be accepted as revealing to us
"the independently real" (p. 18). Should idealism attack science
it will undermine its own foundations (p. 19). This is because "the
supreme concern of idealism is to show that the aesthetic and spir-
itual values have a more than merely human significance ; and there
is not the least hope of so doing if the values that hold in the intel-
lectual domain can not be substantiated as possessing objective
validity" (p. 18). "If knowledge is itself a deception, and its con-
clusions are merely practical devices for temporary adaptation,
forcing belief independently of demonstration, there can be no
hope of vindicating for the other values in life any superhuman
significance" (p. 18). For "it is the very purpose of knowledge to
know." That is certainly candid enough, and it sounds like the
doctrine that conclusions are justified by their desirable results.
But could science help idealism in its supreme concern without the
resources of epistemology? Perhaps the idealist would disclaim
responsibility for what he claims to find implicit in the physiology
of perception, something for which science is responsible. Here is,
of course, an opportunity for discussion without end for those who
like that kind of discussion. The problem envisaged was never
solved, except in the one way that such a problem can be solved,
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 179
which is to show that the conditions of the problem itself make the
solution that is looked for unobtainable. And this is, though it
sounds paradoxical, a logical solution. For the question is, what
is the dialectical sum of the conditions assumed? And a candid
inspection may show that there is no sum, or, what comes to the
same thing, that the sum is indefinitely ambiguous. It is as though
one were to ask whether the square root of a quantity were itself a
plus or a minus quantity. By what right then does any one assure
us that we are cut off from "reality" by a screen of sense-im-
pressions? Of course we may be; so much is admitted. The
"physiological argument," once used so confidently, argued noth-
ing, however, except its own inconclusiveness, and of course all its
data are naturalistic data. Is it not a little as though some one
were to complain of being deaf because he could not hear the music
of the spheres, and of being blind because the Beautiful and the
Good appear in such a fragmentary way? And after all, suppose
the realist to be right, and as Professor Kemp Smith excellently
puts it "the distinctions between appearance and reality be allowed
to 'be as relative and empirical as any other" (p. 15), and that the
world, in spite of metaphysics, is the sort of thing it appears to be
how would that situation differ, so fair as any one can see, from
what the normal 1 experience of every one now presents? And if it
would not differ at all, what evidence is there that the world is not
as it appears? There is, to be sure, no proof that it is so, neither
is there any proof that it is not. And it is of the essence of the
problem, as formulated by both idealists and agnostics, that it can
not be solved except in the manner above indicated. If then we
retain the problem by retaining its presuppositions, we seem to
return to the agnostic position.
And one other consideration: if we claim that men's nobler
sentiments and works gives us a cue to "reality," by what right do
we select thus optimistically ? Take this sentence for example :
1 ' For though man can, indeed, be studied only in his natural setting,
for an understanding of his nature and destiny idealism refers us
to that wider reality which is depicted in poetry and the arts, and
worshiped in religion ..." (p. 22). If reality is all of a piece,
or if the course of events be divinely guided, we have no right to
choose one fact rather than another to serve as a clue. The ad-
venture of Germany with its dire consequences is, for aught we
can tell, as revealing as anything else. We should remember the
wisdom, of Parmenides when he cautioned Socrates against the
pragmatism of the heart.
But with regard to the last quotation above, the naturalist may
agree, in a sense, but it would not be, I think, the sense of idealism.
180 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
For that domain to which we are referred 'by poetry and the arts
is a very important part of man's empirical world, improved by his
industry for his purposes, enriched for himself and for his children,
and enlarged in his imagination for bettering his natural present
and future.
(C) And as to science as something that man has achieved in
spite of his "animal nature." Is not the impression justified that
the term "animal nature 7 ' is used too loosely or too rigidly? What-
ever nature is concerned has all the capacity that stands revealed.
But let me quote, for its excellent precision, the following passage:
"Yet the fact that science exists at all, that the human mind has
proved capable of acquiring it, when taken with the other achieve-
ments of the human spirit, in the arts, in the moral, social and
religious life, outweighs in philosophical significance, and sets in a
very different perspective, the conclusions reached exclusively
through study of man's physical conditions" (p. 19). Again the
naturalist must agree, but he will not, in doing so, agree with the
idealist to the latter 's satisfaction. And the comment here may be
somewhat like the preceding one.
When we stand amazed at the distance man has come since the
first stone age. we should feel tempted to follow the story of his
progress. Surely no story is more interesting. Man has achieved
his science and his arts laboriously and bit by bit. The progress he
has made seems, to be sure, extraordinary when we imagine a
modern architect or engineer beside a savage, but it may be because
of our ignorance now that it seems so. Moreover, it seems, accord-
ing to the idealists, to incline us to error. And if one could follow
that progress bit by bit, and step by step, every advance would, we
may presume, be quite intelligible under the circumstances, not in
terms of physics and mechanics but in terms of human knowledge
and imagination. The natives of Australia are quite as real as any
one else, and some day the natural conditions of our planet may
condition a miserable existence for mankind, without much in the
way of art or spiritual values, conditions brought about perhaps,
by man's stupidity and improvidence. Who can tell?
(D) And for understanding the history of philosophy few aids
are more important than the story of man's earlier conditions.
Animism says Professor Kemp Smith, "is indeed the cradle of
human thought." I should prefer to call it the cradle of meta-
physics, but be that as it may, it has provided a tradition that con-
tinues in an attenuated form down to the present time. For I sup-
pose no one will claim that it has to-day the vigor and social im-
portance that are testified to by the gothic cathedrals, the ancient
temples and the religious practises of primitive people. That
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 181
animism has provided the subjects and much of the inspiration of
glorious art I should be the first to insist. Man's " spiritual" con-
cerns were phrased for so long in that vocabulary, its terms early
acquired such a power to stir the emotions, that it is not surprising
that the philosophy which takes for its especial theme man's
"spiritual" life has usually been animistic. For after all, we need
not always use the speech of a laboratory. We can say many things
in a language of the imagination. Metaphors, if well chosen, are
understood.
The relation of idealism to animism is, as the lecture points out,
very intimate and cordial. And it provides, I think, the real basis
of the opposition between idealism and naturalism; for the opposi-
tion becomes determined and self-conscious on the side of naturalism
in proportion as the latter formulates its theory of ethics. The oppo-
sition is not between an interest in the lower and a concern for the
higher, but between two different ways of championing the higher.
The whole issue becomes clearer if we contrast naturalism with
what seems to be the essence of idealism when existentially pre-
sented, namely, supernaturalism. Now this, as a metaphysical tradi-
tion, more or less incorporated in institutions, is obviously a survival
or a development, whichever you please, from very primitive culture.
4 * These beliefs may be, ' ' we are told, ' * reestablished on other grounds,
but certainly not on the evidence which originally led to their adop-
tion" (p. 12). And! I will interpret this as meaning "scientific-
ally" reestablished. But on what grounds could they be, as we
understand science to-day, thus reestablished? Not, I suppose by
authority or tradition, nor by a tender-minded pragmatism, nor by
dialectic, if formal arguments, as such, are seen to bring no reports
about existence. Is it then, by virtue of man's normal powers of
observation and the natural science he has so superbly wrought that
animism shall be reestablished? This is, however, the only way in
which existential hypotheses can be substantiated, but it is the way
of naturalism, and one is not likely by taking it, to arrive at super-
naturalism. Idealists remind us, properly enough, of how incom-
plete our knowledge is so incomplete that though what science we
have favors naturalism, we are, after all, so ignorant that no one
need 1 be discouraged. But why may not this uncertainty cheer the
naturalist also?
(E) "If man is the most highly organized form of existence
known to us, and therefore the most contingently conditioned, and
therefore also, as naturalism is constrained to argue, the most pro-
vincial, how comes it that he can pass judgments that have uni-
versal validity ? " ( p. 28 ) .
One good definition of inference is the application of a rule to
182 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
particular instances. We do of course pass judgments that claim
universal validity; they are either descriptions of natural regulari-
ties oibserved and remembered, or rules of procedure. In the
former case the form of universality is a convenient simplification
which ignores deliberately or unconsciously the possibility that
more knowledge would modify our description, ignores, that is, for
purposes of economy, the ignorance that idealists frequently remind
us of; in the latter case, in which alone the form of universality is
philosophically justified, we come back to the consideration that
strict as opposed to provisional 1 universality is a dialectical property,
technical in character and importance. This does not mean that
the laws of physics are illusions; it means only that physics is a
very technical science, and that the formulations of its laws are
technical formulations. I am, unfortunately, not acquainted with
any good analysis of this point, and my statement of it is con-
sequently very far from satisfactory. But, for purposes of analysis,
we can distinguish between subject matter and technique, between
data and method, between, though here the distinction is itself
perhaps only technical, the type of science that gives us the subject
matter or enlarges it (and I mean an existential subject matter
such as biology), and the type of science that gives us technique,
such as logic and mathematics. We can distinguish, experimentally
at least, (between the existential sciences that enlarge a subject
matter of observation, and the non-existential sciences that provide
us with technique to be used in the former, and to be played with,
very seriously of course, by making the principles of technique their
own subject matter.
Now how could there be such a thing as technique or method,
or any distinction between a right and a wrong way of procedure,
if nature did not show a high degree of regularity in the relation
of what we call physical causes to physical effects. How could an
architect proceed with any confidence, or a surgeon handle a case
"scientifically;" how could that advance of science, which encour-
ages the idealist to question the conclusions it favors, ever take
place if nature did not behave on one occasion as she has been seen
to behave on another? How could anybody, idealist or naturalist,
befriend art, science, and man's spirit with any wisdom if he could
not find out how to go about it? The practise of intelligence re-
quires at least so much physical regularity, that general rules can
be applied to particular cases. That the rule will work this time as
it has in the past is a methodological assumption, never a meta-
physical discovery in advance of the fact. And what is true for
the practise of intelligence is no less true for the practise of virtue.
"How comes it that he can pass judgments that have universal
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 183
validity?" It would 1 seem that he can do so because physical na-
ture obliges him to if he would prosper under the conditions which
are offered him. And the judgments which are strictly universal in
the logical sense are technical and not existential judgments. There
is no mystery until we attempt to urge conclusions that go beyond
the evidence, and which the evidence thus far available does not even
suggest, but which a tradition which took its rise in primitive culture
sufficiently explains.
(F) According to Professor Kemp Smith the idealist bases his
claim to serious consideration on the fact that his particular con-
cern is to cultivate and help others to cultivate those higher regions
of experience in which human nature finds its ripe fruition. What
are these best fruits of life as the idealist understands them? I
may not be wrong in suggesting art, poetry, society, personality,
science perhaps. Now how is art produced and strengthened?
How is it stimulated and helped? By teaching a vision of "Real-
ity"? Perhaps. The best art, has, however, been always the art
that was most honest and knew most intimately the world it lived in.
And who are the ones that really help society ? All sorts of people
help society and in all sorts of ways, and teachers of idealism share
in the work; but I suspect it is not so much their doctrine as the
personal quality, influence and example of the men that count. It
will not do to confine poetry, but on the whole it is safe to say that
the poet needs to know not metaphysics but life. Heaven and the
animistic earth were long his universe of discourse. They can
seldom be so now, since life is not described that way. Surely sci-
ence and its technical applications in the arts do not need the super-
natural. Personality is a subtle thing but it is to be sought in what
breeds character, im Strom der Welt.
Does idealism's place in the world depend) uipon an obligation to
prove that "the aesthetic and spiritual values have a more than
merely human significance" (p. 18) ? But why say that what is
human is "merely human," or that it can not be safely and richly
human unless it be shown to be superhuman also ? Here is perhaps
the crucial question.
Every reader of philosophy will recognize the approach to the
City of God whither the road in the lecture leads. It is his citizen-
ship in that polis that confers on man, idealism holds, his intrinsic
excellence. The idealist feels that somehow our highest values are
compromised and threatened to turn into amiable illusions if they
are altogether natural and human. Loyalty to them demands, there-
fore, that he vindicate their "superhuman significance."
Idealism is, indeed, loyal to those highest things, whose reality
in some fashion no thoughtful friend of man can wish to question.
184 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
And! we need not deny, surely, man's right to aspire to something
that one might call ' ' the City of God. ' ' But the language with which
to praise spiritual values is one thing, while the ideas with which to
foster them are another. Results not yet achieved but ardently
desired, ideals which the world exemplifies in but slight and sorry
fashion but to which men and women may devote their lives, visions
of perfection that man might, conceivably, with enough good-will and
sacrifice and patient science, realize approximately in his physical
dwelling place, these things are in and of the imagination, and an
imaginative language full of associations conveys best our response
to them of loyalty and communicates the emotions they evoke. Such
language is gratifying and artistic, but is it scientific ? When, how-
ever, something is to be done, we have to fall back upon the resources
of cause and effect that nature provides us with. Art and science,
friendship, personality and love can be really fostered only by im-
proving the conditions they depend upon. These conditions are not
merely material in the grosser sense they include culture and edu-
cation 'as well as shelter, clothing and food. As an example one may
cite the "social psychology" which friends of the spiritual values
are trying to secure. If they succeed they present the friends of
morality and art with the kind of knowledge that the world sadly
needs. If any one is happier and better for believing that values
are superhuman, he is surely welcome to his faith, but whenever he
seeks to really promote a cause in the world, he must adapt his
method to what the empirical facts happen to be. This is, perhaps,
a pity, but it is a situation that the naturalist has learned to accept.
I have not asked my questions as simply and as briefly as I
intended to, but perhaps I can ask them now.
(A) Must we not recognize that logic is a purely formal and
technical science, and therefore not adapted to decide existential
problems? And if so, must we not admit that such problems have
to be decided by the evidence of empirical observation?
(B) Must we not give up that conception of knowledge which
assumes for it a more than empirical certainty, and formulate a new
conception obtained by describing familiar cases of knowledge
grounded on evidence, such as biology, chemistry, history? Must
we not, in a word, 'begin to use an empirical epistemology. In
America, as Professor Kemp Smith is well aware, an important be-
ginning has been made.
(0) Are we not deceiving ourselves when we dwell upon man's
"animal nature," with the result that human progress and civiliza-
tion becomes inexplicable on natural grounds? Is that idea a
remnant, perhaps, of Kantian austerity?
(D) In view of the relation which the nature of logic and the
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 186
importance of empirical evidence bear to the whole discussion, must
we not accept the naturalistic account of the animistic tradition?
This does not mean that we scoff at the gods of Greece, or at the
art of the Middle Ages, or at the logic of Hegel. It does not mean
that we regret the animistic tradition in history. It means only
that we recognize a tradition where there is one, and, on a question
of fact (not to be confused with a question of value), we make our
decision on the basis of the evidence we have. The naturalist does
not regard these decisions as necessarily final, finality being a
dialectical virtue.
(E) Is it not clear that what makes successful inference possible
in the extra-academic life is the regularity of nature and of organ-
ized human affairs? One whose experience did not teach him to
infer would not survive long in the physical world that we know.
And is not logic thus accounted for without mystery, and man's
incorrigible ha'bit of generalization, as well as his admirable skill in
passing universal judgments?
(F) And finally, what reason is there except an attachment to
what is imaginative and poetic, for supposing that spiritual values
are in any wise lacking in human worth if they are "merely
human ' ' ?
Ill
I began by saying that in this discussion it might be well to seek
a new orientation, and the lecture itself by its classification of philo-
sophical attitudes as skepticism, naturalism and idealism suggests
what this might be. Instead of this historical classification suppose
we speak of criticism, knowledge and purpose. , What Professor
Kemp Smith says of skepticism is just and) sufficient, and will
answer as an appreciation of the function of criticism. The civili-
zation that man has 'built up is partly a function of his social ex-
perience and traditions, but it is largely a function of his slowly
acquired science. In any case, if ideals are to be translated into
purposes, success depends not only on the necessary goodwill, but on
the necessary knowledge. The discontinuity 'between science and
human interests is entirely accidental, owing largely to the inevit-
able specialization in any world where much progress has been made.
People differ, of course, in temperament and capacity, and academic
likes and dislikes get translated sometimes into theoretic harmonies
and discords. But if the idealist is beginning to find, as he surely
ought to, in the naturalist as loyal a servant as himself of higher
things, and if the naturalist can understand the symbolism of the
supernaturalist, a new beginning has been made. Ideals are help-
less without the knowledge that science alone can offer, and science
undevoted to ideals is a technical or an academic specialization. The
186 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
just conception of naturalism is therefore far more generous than
the one idealists seem to entertain. Naturalism completed and
thought out does not turn into animistic idealism, but it does develop
into an empirical idealism in which the word idealism recovers its
popular meaning 'and signifies a whole-souled response to humanity's
needs and opportunities.
Such an empirical idealism is, it seems to the reviewer, what
philosophy is on the way to 'becoming, and this should give us the
orientation that many students of it must long have wished for.
Old ideas, as expressive of an honest moral faith, and held as
precious by so many men and women of fine culture, are not to be
treated as merely speculative error; but they must be re-identified
as genuinely imaginative. The field of expression we need to recog-
nize is the one called poetry, and to identify idealism as poetry is by
no means to reject its essential faith and its analysis of what is
called in the lecture "the intimate aspect of experience." Ideal-
ism's faith in art and poetry as a serious and important expression
of the human spirit is referred to in the lecture, and this faith is
natural to those who are at home in a similar atmosphere and who
are interested, ultimately, not in facts but in values, if the antithesis
may be allowed. If idealism is esteemed for its implications, so is
poetry valued for the sensitive wisdom which men and women that
know those " intimate aspects of experience" have so often used it
to reveal. The identity is an identity of function. Supernaturalism
can not be any longer justified as knowledge, but it may be justified
as poetry if used with enlightened sincerity. For as the lecturer
justly says (p. 19), "idealism can not afford to be obscurantist."
This transition from super-naturalism to "ethically idealistic"
naturalism, from animistic "idealism" to empirical idealism, is I
believe, going on in philosophy at the present time.
WENDELL T. BUSH.
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY.
ROUSSEAU AND CONSCIENCE
MY volume Rousseau and Romanticism evidently strikes Pro-
fessor Schinz as a violent diatribe rather than as a sober
critique. Curiously enough his review 1 affects me in very much
the same way. He seems to me to make an almost bewildering
variety of misleading statements either about my point of view or
that of Rousseau varied by an occasional misstatement. As an
example of the latter one may take his assertion that I abuse
Rousseau and the Rousseauists "because they express regret at not
i See this JOURNAL, Vol. XVII., No. 1, January 1, 1920.
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 187
having conquered their passions." The true charge that I bring
against them is that they take as a badge of spiritual superiority
the sheer intensity of their emotional and imaginative unrestraint.
As an example of a misleading statement one may take the
passage about Rousseau and Kultur. If one had no other source of
information than Professor Schinz's review one might gather that
I ascribe to Rousseau this influence upon the Germans purely from
personal bias and eccentricity. This influence is, on the contrary,
one of the best established facts of literary history. The Germans
themselves, to do them justice, so far from denying this influence,
are even inclined to overstate it. For example, Professor Paul
Hensel says in his Rousseau (1907), that (compared with his in-
fluence in Germany) "Rousseau's influence in France seems almost
trifling." In Germany "Rousseau became the basis not of a guil-
lotine but of a new culture [Kultur]."
Professor Schinz does not make sufficiently clear that I have not
attempted in my volume rounded estimates of individuals, not even
of Rousseau; and that I have not attacked romanticism in general,
but only one of three main types of romanticism that I am careful
to distinguish- a type that is practically identical with emotional
naturalism or sentimentalism ; and finally that I am attacking pri-
marily even this type only in its ethical pretensions. Here the
crucial point is the treatment of conscience by the emotional nat-
uralists. The corruption of conscience, as I say, underlies all other
modern corruptions; so that everything finally converges upon this
point. One may judge from the trustworthiness of Professor
Schinz's report on this matter as to the general soundness of his
review. Commenting on my statement that "Rousseau transforms
conscience itself from an inner check to an expansive emotion," he
says that this "of course is not true at all" (-my italics). For any
one who has read the eighteenth century sentimentalists (and
Rousseau is by general consent the arch-sentimentalist) the "of
course" and the "at all" are simply staggering. All students of
the period were, I had supposed, agreed that Rousseau and the
sentimentalists conceived that they had only to "let their feelings
run in soft luxurious flow" and the result would be "virtue."
Rousseau, says that perspicacious moralist Joubert, changed virtue
from a bridle into a spur. Virtue becomes a passion, differing
from other passions, not in kind, but only in degree.- 2 Evidence on
this point, were it worth while, could be piled up mountains high.
The tendency of course did not originate with Rousseau. In his
2C/. Nouvelle H&o'ise, 4* partie, lettre XII., passage beginning: "L'on ne
triomphe des passions qu'en les opposant I'une a I'autre. Quand celle de la
vertu vient a s 'elever, ' ' etc.
188 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
work Is Conscience an Emotion f (1914), Hastings Rashdall has
pointed out the influence here of Shaftesbury, Hutcheson and the
English deists.
Some traces of the older dualistic morality are indeed to be
found in Rousseau ; 3 but this is a minor trend in Rousseau himself
and is practically negligible in his influence, with which alone I am
concerned in my volume. Is Professor Schinz naive enough to sup-
pose that because Rousseau uses the word " virtue" forty-three
times in his first Discourse what he opposes to the luxurious degen-
eracy of his contemporaries is a genuine Roman virtue or a
true Calvinistic conscience? "Rousseau," says Joubert again,
"took wisdom from men's souls by talking to them about virtue."
Rousseau's conception of virtue is neither Roman nor Calvinistic
but primitivistic a return to "nature" and the simple life. When
we turn to the second Discourse to find out what is meant by "na-
ture" we discover that Rousseau's nature is nothing real but only
an Arcadian dream. We come here to the true sources of Rous-
seau's power. He is highly imaginative but along idyllic lines. He
throws the glamour of this type of imagination over expansive im-
pulse. Get rid of traditional restraints, he says in substance, (they
are only artificial and conventional), and what will result will be a
golden age of pure "liberty." English readers are familiar with
this conception of "liberty" in Shelley's Prometheus Unbound and
also in the mouthings of our latest anarchists.
Moral excellence for Rousseau is not the result of a difficult
struggle but, if one is only a "beautiful soul," that is, if one has
remained a child of nature in the midst of social perversions, one
has, in order to be at the same time good and beautiful, merely
to follow one's spontaneous temperamental leaning. Thus Julie
"n'eut jamais d'autre regie que son cceur, et n'en saurait avoir de
plus sure; elle s'y lime sans scrupule, et, pour bien faire, elle fait
tout ce qu'il demande."* Professor Schinz indulges in a reckless
abuse of language when he associates with Calvinism and Puritan-
ism the idyllic pictures in the latter part of the Nouvelle Hel&ise,
presided over by this "beautiful soul" whose very death-bed is
esthetic and without a single qualm as to her future state. It is
3 The most dualistic passage I can discover in Rousseau is found in the Pro-
fession de foi du Vicaire Savoyard: "Non, I'homme n'est point un: je veux et
je ne veux pas, je me sens a la fois esclave et libre; je vois le bien, je I'aime et J9
fais le mal," etc.
* Nouvelle Hloise, 5 e partie, lettre II. Cf. also ibid. : ' ( Julie Hail faite
pour connaltre et gouter tous les plaisirs, et longtemps elle n'aima si cherement
la vertu meme que comme la plus douce des volupUs." Of Julie's "affinity,"
Saint-Preux, Rousseau writes approvingly that, contrary to the accepted view,
ft il farlt de la conscience morale un sentiment, et non pas un jugement."
PSYCHOLOGY AND, SCIENTIFIC METHODS 189
a "common thing," says Jonathan Edward's describing the true
effect of Calvinism, "that persons have had such a sense of their
own sinfulness that they have thought themselves to be the worst of
all, and that none ever was so vile as they." Rousseau on the con-
trary looked on himself as the best of men, and tends to inspire a
similar spiritual complacency in others.
One point of the utmost importance must be kept in mind if one
is to understand the influence of Rousseau. It is implied in his
own saying that "his heart and head do not seem to belong to the
same individual," and this sentence is to be read in the light of
what he says very truly elsewhere, that ' ' cold reason has never done
anything illustrious." The side of Rousseau that proceeds from
his "head," often very shrewd and even wise, is negligible in the
kind of study I have attempted because it has had little effect on
other men. It is the imaginative and passionate side of Rousseau,
his "heart," which has moved the world. Rousseau's "reason"
indeed is not always "cold." We often find in his writings logic
in the service of the emotions and moving towards some Utopia con-
jured up by the Arcadian imagination. Rousseau's "head" would
have disapproved of the Revolution which his "heart" (often with
his logic as its accomplice) did so much to prepare. I accept M.
Lanson's contrast between the two Rousseaus, except that I am not
inclined, as he seems to be, to accuse Rousseau of moral cowardice.
"The writer," he says, "is a poor dreamy creature who approaches
action only with alarm, and with every manner of precaution, and
who understands the applications of his boldest doctrines in a way
to reassure conservatives and satisfy opportunists. But the work
for its part detaches itself from the author, lives its independent
life, and, heavily charged with revolutionary explosives which neu-
tralize the moderate and conciliatory elements Rousseau has put
into it for his own satisfaction, it exasperates and inspires revolt
and fires enthusiasms and irritates hatreds; it is the mother of
violence, the source of all that is uncompromising, it launches the
simple souls who give themselves up to its strange virtue upon the
desperate quest of the absolute, an absolute to be realized now by
anarchy and now by social despotism." If I deny the Rousseauistic
conception of conscience and morality, it is precisely because it leads
in practise to these violent and impossible extremes. Because of
this denial Professor Schinz says I am guilty of a fanaticism worse
than " Mohammedism, " Prussianism, Bolshevism, and the Inquisi-
tion all rolled into one ! To be able to push one 's emotional fervor
to such <a pitch even in the cool atmosphere of a Journal of Sci-
entific Methods would seem to illustrate the very tendency under
190 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
discussion. Professor Schinz is filled with what Jean-Jacques calls
"the indignation of virtue."
On the negative side my conclusions are, as a matter of fact, very
similar to those of Dr. Rashdall. ''The emotionalist theory of
ethics," he says, "however little intended to have that result by its
supporters is fatal to the deepest spiritual convictions and to the
highest spiritual aspirations of the human race." The difficulty
begins when one seeks a substitute for emotionalist ethics. It is
hard to see that Rashdall, like Kant himself, gets beyond rationalism.
As against a rationalistic foundation for ethics the saying of Rous-
seau holds good that "cold reason has never done anything illus-
trious." In these final orientations of the human spirit it is nec-
essary to fight fire with fire. The fact is that what is opposed to
man 's natural will and ordinary impulsive self is not mere ' ' reason ' '
or "judgment" but another type of will, an ethical will, as one may
say, that is felt in its relation to the expansive desires as a power
of direction and control. The ethical reality or standard or "one-
ness," with reference to which control is exercised, man can not, I
have tried to show, get 'at directly, but only with the aid of ' ' fiction ' '
or "illusion" or "imagination." Here, in intention at least, is the
constructive side of my volume. I seek to develop the contrast be-
tween the idyllic or Arcadian imagination of a Rousseau and the
ethical, or, as Burke terms it, the moral imagination that one finds
in the true sages. This latter type of imaginative "vision" leads
to entirely different fruits in action, the only thing that finally
matters. The ethical will needs the support of the imagination, if
it is to prevail against the natural will. Holding as it does the
balance of power between the two conflicting "wills," the imagina-
tion may, as I say, be regarded as the universal key to human
nature ("Imagination," in Napoleon's phrase, "governs the
world"). If one is therefore to treat in a modern, that is, in a
positive and critical fashion, the ethical problem, one must deal
adequately with the role of the imagination. This the founder of
the critical philosophy does not seem to me to have done either in
the Critique of Judgment or elsewhere. There is surely something
better to do in the ethical field than to oscillate between rationalism
and emotionalism, between the mechanistic nightmare and the
romantic dream. The Rousseauist would substitute a facile ex-
pansiveness for the Pauline conflict between a law of the spirit and
a law of the members and at the same time would enjoy the fruits
for example, peace and brotherhood that can come only from ac-
cepting this conflict and carrying it through. One may sympathize
in a way with this particular form of the desire to have one's cake
and eat it too, especially when one considers the flattery of human
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 191
nature that romantic morality implies with reference to the Calvin-
istic theology from which it is a recoil ; yet it would seem urgent at
present to dissipate this sham spirituality, the more dangerous be-
cause the less obvious aspect of our present materialism, and to re-
establish, if possible, on a thoroughly positive and critical basis the
checks and inhibitions of true conscience. Rousseau has so far
transcended in his influence the mere man of letters as to challenge
comparison with the founders of religions. This comparison I have
accordingly made. If it leads me to express a preference for Jesus
and Buddha, a preference that seems to inspire in Professor Schinz
a certain chagrin, the reason is that these teachers did not seek like
Rousseau and the Rousseauists to found the religious virtues on the
ruin of the inner life.
IRVING BABBITT.
HARVARD UNIVERSITY.
REVIEWS AND ABSTRACTS OF LITERATURE
Metaphysique et Psychologic. THEODORE FLOURNOY. Deuxieme
edition. Paris: Fischbacher. 1919. Pp. xvi + 195.
A second edition of this important work was a long-felt need.
When the book appeared for the first time in 1890, it was at once
recognized as one of the leading studies in the field of experimental
psychology. The author, who was at the same time a physician and
a philosopher, had mastered once for all the relations which are
bound to exist between experimental psychology and metaphysics.
Since then, numerous volumes have increased M. Flournoy's reputa-
tion and made him a leading authority on the subject. But his first
work is still one of his best productions ; and this new edition, pre-
ceded by a preface of Harald Hoffding, is a faithful reproduction
of the first.
As a foundation of the science of psychology, the author proposes
the well-known law of parallelism between the mental states and the
bodily conditions. Inspired by the same principles which the prag-
matists have since made *popular, he regards this law as a working
principle, as a hypothesis whose function is simply to guide us in
our researches. It may be held in connection with any metaphysical
theory ; and, if we try to investigate its essence, we will see that it is
nothing but a confession of ignorance. The relations between mind
and body are as mysterious to-day as they were at the dawn of
human thought; and all philosophical systems intended to explain
them have been a decided failure.
The author examines in a brief, but thorough, manner, the most
192 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
important of these systems: materialism, idealism, spiritualism and
monism, and points out the fact that they have not helped us in any
way towards the knowledge of reality.
A nearer approach to ultimate truth is, according to our author,
the theory which holds, with the author of the Critique of Practical
Reason, that the moral law furnishes us an insight into reality
itself, which science merely shapes according to human categories.
And here again, the author agrees to a certain extent with our mod-
ern pragmatists, who teach us that the categories of science have
been shaped by man for practical purposes, and that there is a real-
ity deeper than what our intellect can reach.
M. Flournoy's work is one of the best contributions to the sub-
ject of the relations between experimental psychology and meta-
physics. It ought not to be overlooked by any student of philosophy.
JOSEPH Louis PERRIER.
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY.
Towards Racial Health. NORAH H. MARCH. New York : Button &
Company. 1919. Pp. 318.
This handbook on the training of boys and girls for parents,
teachers and social workers, written nearly five years ago in the
British Isles, is now printed in the United States. Dr. J. Arthur
Thompson, professor of natural history, writes a foreword and the
American edition has an introduction by Dr. Evangeline W.
Young, of Boston. Parents, teachers and social workers will be
assisted by Miss March's work, in giving sex education to the young
who come under their care. The book is for such teachers and not
a text for boys and girls. Miss March emphasizes the biological
aspect of her subject. Some of the chapter headings are misleading
as to their contents. After reading chapters entitled "Mental De-
velopment" and "Supervision Psychological Aspect," the re-
viewer wishes Miss March had either omitted such titles for chapters
or collaborated with a psychologist when writing them. In the dis-
cussion on "Mental Development" one finds the statement, "We
must remember that, fundamentally, men and women are biolog-
ically and consequently psychologically different organisms" (p. 31).
The reviewer wonders what Miss March means to imply by * ' psycho-
logically different organisms." Proof for the statement in place of
"consequently" would be more convincing.
Chapters VI. and VII. (67 pages) are devoted to Nature Study
and Biology of Sex. Chapter IX has the misleading title "Educa-
tion for Parenthood" but it contains an array of information from
the works of Karl Pearson, Tredgold, and others.
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 193
Sixty-four pages include Appendix I. (Some Suggestions for
Parents on How to Answer Childish Questions and How to Prepare
Children for Puberal Changes), Appendix II. (Special Hygiene for
Girls), Appendix III. (Physiology of Human Reproduction), Ap-
pendix IV. (Care of Animals and Some Notes on Plant Life re-
ferred to in the Text). A bibliography for each chapter is ap-
pended. Most of the books mentioned are those published in England.
The American edition should prove helpful to many who have
not seen the book. What Miss March has done is well done her
chapters are poorly named, however. The American edition would
be improved if statistics from American institutions and organiza-
tions were added.
EDITH MULHALL ACHILLES.
NEW YORK CITY.
JOURNALS AND NEW BOOKS
REVUE DE METAPHYiSIQUE ET DE MORALE. Septem-
ber-October, 1919. Les Facteurs kantiens de la Philosophic alle-
mande du commencement du XIX siecle (pp. 569-593. A suivre) :
V. DELBOS. - Kant 's critique does not merely justify Leibnizian
doctrines in a new way, but also suggests a new metaphysical theory.
His successors at the opening of the nineteenth century began to
develop this new system by discussing the consistency of Kant's
position as to the ding an sich with the rest of his critique. The
article describes the essential points raised in this discussion by
Jacobi, Reinhold, Schulze, Maimon, Beck, and Fichte. Les erreurs
systematiques de I'intuitian (pp. 595-616): L. ROUGIER- Con-
temporary mathematical analysis discloses the many errors and
illusions which have crept into metaphysics because of our naive
reliance upon "spatial intuition" or "geometrical empiricism" in
interpreting the cosmos. As examples of such error M. Rougier
discusses the belief in the infinite continuity of space, in an infinite
void, in absolute movement, in absolute size, form, and direction.
The errors of "spatial intuition" are classified according to their
sources into two main groups: (1) errors due to the inaccuracy of
our senses, as described in Weber's laws of "the just perceptible
increment of stimulation;" (2) errors due to the egocentrism of
our senses in referring all things to the human body as a standard
of measurement. L' attitude religieuse des Jesuites et les sources du
pari de Pascal (pp. 617-647. Suite et fin) : L. BLANCHET. - Pascal
opposed as a Jansenist to the rationalistic naturalism of Jesuit
apologetics, nevertheless develops his famous wager along lines sug-
194 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
gested in the works of Jesuit writers like Arnobe, Sebond, Silhon,
and especially Pere Sirmond. For the Jesuits, however, external
conformity to Christian conventions is a minimum religious life to
which reason can lead the unbeliever. For Pascal, on the other
hand, external conformity is all that reason can ever produce in the
natural man. When by considering the infinite advantages of be-
lief (as developed in the wager) an unbeliever is brought into out-
ward conformity to Christian conventions, only the grace of God
can pour into his heart a saving faith. Etudes Critiques. Les
Principes de I' Analyse matkematique par Pierre Boutroux (pp.
649-667) : M. WINTER. -In his Principles of Mathematical Analysis
M. Boutroux attempts a systematic account of the concepts of mathe-
matical science, which will be intelligible to initiates in the phi-
losophy of mathematics. M. Winter gives a sympathetic and ample
description of the book. Questions Pratiques. Citoyen ou Pro-
duct eur? (pp. 669-684): M. LEBOY.-The French Revolution
brought as the ideal of our age, the "free citizen." But this ideal
has a rich social significance only in contrast to the preceding age
of political absolutism. To-day the "free citizen" with his vote
is a colorless figure. But a new ideal of to-morrow is developing,
that of the producteur, the free worker, or perhaps we should say
the free artist.
Hoernle, R. F. Alfred. Studies in Contemporary Metaphysics.
New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe. 1920. Pp. viii + 306.
Penido, M. T.-L. La Methode intuitive de M. Bergson. Paris:
Felix Alcan. 1918. Pp. 220. 3.50 fr. (majoration temporaire
30%).
Richardson, C. A. Spiritual Pluralism and Recent Philosophy.
Cambridge, Eng. : The University Press. New York : Putnam 's.
1919. Pp. xxi + 335. 14/ . $4.50.
NOTES AND NEWS
A REMARKABLE collection of early editions of philosophical books
recently formed by the Division of Philosophy at Harvard has been
put on exhibition in the Treasure Room of the Widener Library.
The collection consists partly of books which already belong to
the College Library or to the Robbins Library of Philosophy, but
mainly of a very valuable gift of first editions, manuscripts, and
autographed letters, which has recently been presented by Professor
George Herbert Palmer.
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 195
In the collection are to be seen lecture notes by Fichte, in his own
hand; a letter of Descartes, written in December, 1647, reporting
his correspondence with Pascal and saying that he had suggested
carrying a barometer to a great height in order to test the weight of
the atmosphere; and several manuscripts of John Stuart Mill.
The Mill manuscripts include a review of Grote's Aristotle and
portions of his Inaugural Address at St. Andrews, of his speech on
the Enlargement of the Franchise, and several unpublished notes.
They illustrate his elaborate methods of work, showing corrections
and changes in nearly every sentence and often differing widely
from the final printed form.
Leibniz's first book is on exhibition, with an autograph letter
addressed to a friend, M. Schmidt, dated Hanover, 7 April, 1702.
He closes by saying, "This minute the King of Prussia has arrived
and I must go to the lecture hall."
The manuscript of William James's Will to Believe is in the col-
lection. The list of first editions on exhibition is very long. It in-
cludes Mill On Liberty, Kant's Critik, Emerson's Nature, part of
Spencer's First Principles, Bishop Berkeley's New Theory of Vision,
Hobbes' Leviathan, and various works of Locke, Huss, Pascal, etc.
This collection is the beginning of a large collection which the
Division of Philosophy hopes to build up covering many divisions of
its field so that scholars may be assured of a place in this country
where they can find original editions of the chief writers on Philos-
ophy systematically gathered.
The contributions to the collection already made have come from
a large number of sources. The hope is expressed at Harvard that
such giving may continue and that friends of Harvard and Philos-
ophy, seeing the beginning already made, may be prompted to con-
tribute from time to time precious volumes of a similar sort from
their own libraries.
THE last few months have seen the reappearance of several of the
European journals which were forced to suspend publication during
the war.
The Revue Neo-Scalastique de Philosophie of Louvain, edited by
Professor Maurice de Wulf, has sent out its issue of August 1914,
the mailing of which was prevented by the German invasion, and has
brought its file up to date by the publication of a number dated No-
vember 1914-1919. Commencing with February of this year it will
appear every three months as formerly.
Another Belgian paper to resume publication is the Revue des
Sciences Philosophique et Theologiques, printed at Kain. In Decem-
196 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
her the editors brought out a double number, which completed the
year 1914, and they will recommence regular publication in April,
when the first two numbers of 1920 will appear under one cover.
The Journal de Psyckologie of Paris, which suspended in 1918,
has resumed publication with its issue of January 15, 1920. In the
future instead of appearing bi-monthly, it will be published monthly
except in August and September. In this first issue the editors,
Pierre Janet and Georgas Dumas, announce a change in the manage-
ment, which hereafter is to include not only French psychologists
and alienists, but Belgians, Brazilians, Greeks, Italians, Roumanians,
Spaniards and Swiss as well. It is pointed out that journals in the
various Romance languages have a very restricted public in com-
parison with those to which the reviews in English or German ap-
peal. To remedy this, the Journal de Psychologic hopes to become a
truly Latin journal, publishing articles by psychologists from all the
Latin countries and appearing simultaneously in the various capitals.
Articles may be written in French, translated into French at the
Journal office, or published in the national language of the author.
In the latter case a brief resume in French will be added. The edi-
tors say, "We have no need to say that in conceiving this type of
journal we have in mind no hostile thought toward the English or
American psychologists, to whom we are bound by so many scientific
ties and so many national and personal sympathies. The Journal de
Psychologic will publish, as in the past, French translations of their
articles and notices of their works, and will feel honored in entertain-
ing the most cordial relations with them, but it hopes to find in the
Latin world the conditions of its development, as other reviews find
these conditions in the Anglo-Saxon, Anglo-American or German
world."
PROFESSOR GEORGE SANTAYANA is spending this year in Europe
and devoting his time to writing. He has just completed a book on
America which is now in the press and which will appear very shortly.
VOL. XVII. No. 8, APRIL 8, 1920
THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS
MOTIVE AND CAPRICE IN ANTHROPOLOGY AND HISTORY
T3ROMISES of the future lie in the past. The achievement of
to-day is but the suggestion of yesterday, and to-day is but
a foothold on to-morrow. I can not share M. Boutroux's feeling
that "the prejudice which makes us read the future in the past,
springs from the mind's effort to reduce movement to fixity, life to
matter." 1 A science which has won recognition, which has marked
off the field of its efforts, and systematized those efforts and their
results, becomes retrospective, and, at the same time, self-critical.
Analysis and estimation of its achievements is a luxury it can not
afford to forego. The path of least resistance may be leading into
a cul de sac, which, by wise prevision, the science can escape. In-
telligent self-direction is not easy unless the future be seen through
the perspective of the past. Lacking both, the prospect, even of
the courageous, is not enviable.
A history of anthropology, embodying the story of its motives,
problems, presuppositions, methods and results, has not yet been
written, but the attempt to briefly sketch this story may not be
unwelcome.
Human nature is constant in its vagaries, if in nothing else.
Man has ever been attracted by the unusual and the unaccustomed
to the exclusion of the fundamental and the universal. First and
last among the motives animating the anthropologist must be placed
this love of the unusual, the fantastic, the grotesque. The play of
savage life moves across his vision in true theatrical style, interest-
ing and amusing because of its vagaries, its naivete, its blindness to
the obvious, its ridiculous over-emphasis of the unimportant, its
amazing oblivion to the important. Shakespeare's Caliban is the
classic embodiment of these "savage" qualities. Their unaccount-
ability and childishness have been accepted as typical. Such quali-
ties inspire the reader and the observer alike with new interests.
i Emil Boutroux, The Beyond that is Within, p. 46.
197
198 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
To maintain the interest there must be a kaleidoscopic shifting of
the scenes in which fantasy follows fantasy.
II
"Whether or not Herodotus is entitled to the epithet of Father of
Lies, he is certainly the foster father of anthropology as well as of
history, and he embodies just those interests and methods which we
should expect to find both in the early anthropologist and in the
early historian. "When he describes the physical characteristics of
another people, it is to note their differences from the Greeks ; if he
speaks of laws, customs, dress, it is to point out the way in which
this people differs from the Greeks. Read his account of the Egyp-
tians, in which he himself seems aware of this guiding motive. This
is not to disparage Herodotus. Disparagement from the present-
day ethnographer would, indeed, be conspicuously unseemly, seeing
that every category of the fieldworker is provided by this admirable
ipioneer ethnographer. Witness his description of the Scythians:
dress, manner of fighting, of burial, customs, superstitions, interpre-
tation of nature. We, of course, fill out the categories more com-
pletely and more carefully; but this is the least that could be
expected of us. Similar ethnographical and historical zeal we find
in Diodorus Siculus, in Strabo, in Cassar, and in Tacitus ; but, except
for a work here and there, such as that of Marco Polo, we meet with
no resumption of this zeal until the renaissance of travel and ex-
ploration in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a revival due
to Marco Polo more than to any other.
The contributions of the Greeks and Romans are, however, not
limited to ethnography and history. Plato seeks to discover the
laws applicable to a growing society with increasing wants that must
be met by new methods. He attempts to select the necessary from
the accidental. Aristotle is actuated by a similar ideal. In Lucre-
tius we have an unexampled expression of the evolutionary point
of view.
Roman speculation is followed by a long period of silence, save
for discussion growing out of ecclesiastical and politico-ecclesiastical
speculations about the nature of social organizations with or without
personality the universitas and the civitas. Not until the seven-
teenth and eighteenth centuries is speculation again occupied with
origins and with racial, national, and human characteristics. There
then appear Montesquieu and Voltaire with their comparative studies
of customs and laws; Rousseau with his entrancing picture of a
life according to nature and the natural equality of human rights ;
Hobbes, postulating a primitive society in which every man's hand
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 199
was raised against his brother ; the learned John Locke, who proved
from the accounts of travelers that ideas, even ideas of right
and wrong, were not innate, but the accidents of birth and tradition ;
and who found in contract the origin 6f society.
By the eighteenth century the two methods which predominate
to-day, those of observation and of speculation, were well under way,
though inclined to hold themselves aloof and be as independent
rather than as supplementary as possible. The reports of travelers
gradually became more first-hand, more circumstantial, more dis-
cerning, finally developing into the monographs of the trained
ethnographer. Meanwhile the theories of the French and English
social philosophers grew and prospered, improving in logical acumen
and in clearness.
The attempt to embody the products of both schools in one
scheme is first undertaken by a too little known eighteenth century
legalist and philosopher, the Scotchman, Lord Monboddo. Lord
Monboddo hopes, by bringing under his purview all types and races
of men, to discover the nature of man as distinguished from all other
members of the animal kingdom. As the domestic animals were
once wild, so likewise was man, until he became domesticated by the
institutions and arts which he evolved and which, in turn, evolved
him. Hence, in savages, representing a condition through which
civilized nations have passed, is to be found that which is funda-
mental and elementary. "If we have discovered so many links of
the chain," writes this evolutionist, "we are at liberty to suppose
the rest, and conclude that the beginning of it must hold that common
nature which connects us with the rest of the animal creation. ' ' 2
A true successor of Lucretius and of Lord Monboddo is E. B.
Tylor, a contemporary of Darwin and of Spencer, who does for
human society very much what Darwin does for animal society,,
both by way of theory and by way of illustration and attempt to
demonstrate by ample fact the correctness of the theories. Tylor 's
contributions combine a masterly command of facts with an unusual
acumen of judgment and facility of expression. This modern Lu-
cretius brings to the study of evolution and survivals the contribu-
tions of fact made by ethnographers and historians, and the con-
tributions of ideas made by the classical and modern social
philosophers.
Thus, the briefest historical survey of motives and methods ap-
plied to human society reveals two as predominant and almost con-
current: the ethnographic or descriptive, and the speculative. It
reveals, also, that neither of these can be developed in isolation nor
2 On Language.
200 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
treated as self-complete and self-directive. The parallel historical
development which they represent can not be merely an accident of
history. Each has, in fact, at almost every stage of its development,
played into the hands of the other. Theory has been revised and
reawakened from its dogmatism through the new facts furnished
by the fieldworkers. The fieldworker is none the less indebted for
his point of view and for the fruitfulness of his facts to the specula-
tive interest which is part of his educational inheritance. Theory
and speculative interest have, throughout, given rise to interpreta-
tions and generalizations and with valuable results to science. It
is a case in which the head can not say unto the feet, "I have no
need of thee," more than feet to the head, "I have no need of thee."
"To execute great things," said Nietzsche, "is difficult, but the
more difficult task is to command great things;" and it is the more
inclusive. It has always been and ever will be true that we under-
stand facts in the proportion that theory develops and clarifies. If
theory that takes no account of the facts is only idly blowing bubbles,
collecting facts without theoretical guidance is only gathering
potsherds.
in
There is a tendency to treat anthropology and history as separate
and apart. Those who recognize the intimate relationship of the
two interpret this relationship in various manners. Anthropology
is represented as a subdivision of history; or as pre-history; or as
history from the larger perspective, including, rather than included
by, history. The close relation with history is obvious enough, and
to ask, "What is anthropology?" is first to ask and answer the
question, "What is history?" We have so frequently been told
that history is but a record of events that we ought no longer to
entertain serious doubts. Many historians seem dominated by no
more intelligent inspiration.
Did we not reflect we might be satisfied with this simple answer,
as pointless as it is simple. The difficulties which it raises are not
dissipated by dismissing them. G. Staniland Wake once remarked:
"that which is possible in social life may reasonably be expected
to occur somewhere or other on the earth's surface." Will history
be complete only after recording all possible occurrences, and will
it be complete then ?
The old Chronideurs, says Max Nordau, were, after all, the true
historians, because they imposed on their subject-matter no personal
nor social values, giving full recognition to all events alike, earth-
quakes, famines, fires, and plagues, as well as political affairs. But
when were these chronicleurs not selecting from among the events
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 201
within their cognizance despite the fact that such selection involves
evaluation? The bite or buzz of a mosquito is as much an event as
an earthquake or a famine. Try as I may, I can not discover how
historians will proceed without choosing their facts, nor how this
choice is possible without evaluation. To describe the task of the
historian as simple is comparable to calling the problems of life and
duty simple. To say that the historian recognizes no such difficul-
ties, in the sense of being profitably aware of them, is another matter.
If history "calls forth conceivable explanations, criticizes these same
explanations, and retains those among them which withstand her
objections/' history is both in fact and of necessity, interpretative
and fraught with all the charm and hazard of an endless dialectic.
Some recognition of this difficulty is embodied in the plaint of a
contemporary historian who has, somewhat after the manner of
Froude, fully recognized that "the first duty of the historical
scholar is to grasp the fact that his limitations as a human being
must ever debar him, even if the most complete material lies ready
to his hand, from attempting more than a personal interpretation
of some part or period of the past. ' ' 3 But, one might reply : If yours
is but a personal interpretation, what interest has it for me more
than any other personal vagary? One suspects that there may be
some truth in the witticism that "History to be interesting and
valuable should be recorded by persons of talent and prejudice or
by chambermaids who listen at keyholes" (Flandrau, Viva Mexico,
New York, 1909, p. 252).
Kant was stimulated by the ' ' praiseworthy circumstantiality with
which our history is now written" to "raise the question as to how
our remote posterity will be able to cope with the burden of history
as it will be transmitted to them after a few centuries. ' ' He answers
his question by the assurance that "they will surely estimate the
history of the oldest times of which the documentary records may
have been long lost, only from the point of view of what will interest
them." The thing that will interest them "no doubt will be what
the nations and governments have achieved, or failed to achieve, in
the universal world-wide relation." 4 Shall we accept Kant's im-
plication that the historian should cater to the interests of future
generations, even as we make the past cater to present interests?
What do we mean when we speak of the interests of future genera-
tions ? Are they not always interests of our own generation which we
vaguely realize and recognize as incipient, as interests not yet come
to full fruition? How else shall we speak of interests of future
generations ?
3H. Morse Stephens, in American Historical Eeview (January, 1916).
* The Natural Principle of the Political Order.
202 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
It has been said that if a philosophy of history is a colossal task
that of the anthropologist is comparatively easy, since he need do no
more than collect and classify the thoughts and customs of various
peoples. 5 But as this classification must be from some point of view
and with some end in mind, the data and method are bound to reflect
a philosophy of some kind. If there is no critical background and
no evaluation we have only vagary, facts without the promise of their
rationale. Not that we should find it uncomfortable to circulate in
a world of facts ; but in facts which illustrate nothing, in a world of
facts which are not embodied in principles and reflect no enlighten-
ment, which are but tell no story. Why not dwell amid the facts
of the Sahara and classify sand globules in the thousand-fold way
that suits erratic fancy? Surely we are not Baconian enough to
think of the mind as "like a glass, capable of the image of the uni-
verse, and desirous to receive it as the eye to receive light." What
we see in nature or in science depends upon our training and ex-
perience. The answers which will be given to our questions are
foreshadowed in our inquiries.
Herbert Spencer brought forward the charge and I have seen it
refuted only in a few noble exceptions that the value of the knowl-
edge imparted by the historian seems based on the supposition that
while it would be a disgrace to be wrong about the amours of Zeus,
and while ignorance of the name of the commander at Marathon
would be discreditable, it is excusable to know nothing of the social
conditions that preceded Lycurgus, and nothing of the origin and
functions of the Areopagus. 6 The historian and the ethnologist alike
have more than once, and in more than one age, been guilty of
kenneling the eagle and letting loose on empyrean flights the goose.
It has been said that the historian must determine what really
was before the philosopher or the moralist can discuss whether the
teaching was of permanent value. 7 The philosopher or moralist
might reply that he can posit the last and apprehend the worth of
the idea whether history has or has not given him the illustration.
But if only through the past can the present be understood, history
becomes necessary as a ministering servant to the other sciences and
philosophies. The best servitors are intelligently discriminating and
sometimes anticipate wants better than do those whom they serve.
In fact, the perfect servant becomes no despicable master, for mastery
is, after all, but one phase of servitude; a mastery of men's minds
s E. B. Taylor, Nineteenth Century, Vol. 40, p. 89.
e Contemporary Beview (1872).
7E. C. Dewick, Primitive Christian Eschatology (1912). So Eanke: "First
of all we must understand the world, and then desire the good," Weltgeschichte,
Vol. 9, p. 236.
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 203
implies no small understanding of their needs, and no menial minis-
tration to them.
IV
History has been concerned with our civilization. If it includes,
here and there, the records of other peoples, of Greece, Rome, Egypt,
or even the American Indian, this is because the bounds of our civil-
ization are being pushed back into an ever more remote past, or
because our civilization has been affected by or has itself affected the
other cultures. For culture as such it has shown no concern. The
ethnologist takes up the task where the historian leaves it and studies
the cruder cultures for their own sake. 8 As for the task of the
anthropologist, why not return to the older and classical sense of
anthropology as a study of man of man as an expression of culture ?
Accepting the point of view both of the historian and of the ethnolo-
gist we might define his task as the problems of cultures.
Such a task involves, of course, an ability to recognize cultures
and a method for treating them as definite entities. The adventur-
ous nature of the task makes it none the less attractive. The cul-
tures, meaning by this term the continuous complex of customs,
habits, and ideas of a people which is shared in its entirety with no
other people are real, are entities, are objective, and are concrete.
They are both as real and as elusive as the characters of individuals.
To individualize these cultures is, then, the beginning of the task,
the supply of the "raw material." If the possibility of such indi-
vidualizing be doubted, as also the reality of these units, which some
find only a metaphorical expression, the skepticism can arise only
from the tardiness with which we depart from the habitual, or be-
cause we find it difficult to take a bird's-eye view of those customs,
habits,, and ideas of a people which we can not readily envisage.
Conceptual imagination must be brought into play, and traditional
insight thwarts the outlook. It is not easy to combine the manifold
into a unity that is comprehensive and compact, however loose the
elements and however far-reaching the ramifications. I do not be-
lieve the task is any the easier when applied to an individual than
when applied to a culture. The difference is that, in the one case,
we accept the unity and reconcile as best we can the divergencies,
while, in the other, we start with diversity and hope, in spite of it,
to stumble upon some unity. The accidents of our historical ap-
proaches bring many tribulations of spirit when we wish to shift to
a new angle. The do ut des theory well applies to the relation
between the bequests of history and our outlook upon life, which can
*But principally for his own.
204 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
find its perspective only through retrospect and orientate itself only
when it has itself been orientated.
For one who will not bring imagination to the task any insight
into the individualizing of cultures is precluded and words have no
pregnant content. But if one is willing to forego the traditional
for the sake of trying a new bill of fare, there is an intellegible menu
with corresponding abundant and substantial fare. As character-
istics of these cultures, by virtue of which we are enabled to indi-
vidualize them and treat them as entities, one may indicate the
following :
I. Each culture embodies or is embodied in a unified social, intel-
lectual, and emotional life. There are frictions and misfits but there
is, at least, a large measure of unification, enough of it to impart
continuity, if not permanence, to the culture. The culture has its
own inertia and continuum.
II. Each culture is characterized by a certain toughness and
solidarity and by the interrelation and interdependence of its parts.
III. As these component parts are mutually dependent and sup-
plementary we find a further characteristic in the articulation of
the parts. Like the members in a living organism they function to
mutual advantage.
IV. By its self-sufficiency and self-completeness, its self-con-
tainedness, and its ability to persist if others disappear, is culture to
be recognized. These qualities, like those already mentioned, are,
of course, relative. But are they not likewise relative in the indi-
vidual whom we accept as an entity and as self-complete, although
we do not suppose the individual is, strictly speaking, self-sufficient,
or will persist unimpared if all other individuals disappear ? 9
The ablest exponent of this view is undoubtedly Emile Durkheim,
who has by word and method often reminded us that "the group
thinks, acts, feels quite differently than its members would, were they
isolated." "When individuals are associated, their association can
give rise to a new life." "By aggregating, interpenetrating, fus-
ing, the individual minds give birth to a being, psychic if you will,
but which constitutes a psychic individuality of a new sort. ' >10
Nor, for that matter, do we in any individual find a thorough articulation
of the component elements of his make-up.
10 The best account to read for his conception of society is the De la di-
vision du travail social (1893). Those who have not access to his^ books and
articles will find a most valuable interpretation in C. E. Gehlke's, Emile DurTc-
heim's Contributions to Sociological Theory. (Columbia University Press: New
York, 1915).
Next to Durkheim the works of Gustave le Bon give perhaps the most posi-
tive and the clearest expression of this conception. See also articles in Eevue
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 205
The task of anthropology, then, becomes clearer. The individual-
ized cultures are the data for anthropological effort as the individual
is object material for the psychologist. What are the laws that
apply to these cultures? What results from cultural contact and
contagion? What is the role of the individual? How do cultures
reflect progress in the arts, in ideas, in ethical achievements? Is
this progress constant or intermittent, and perhaps backward as well
as forward moving? Do the several cultures furnish us repetitions,
in various form, of the same themes of social, and of individual
struggle and success, or do the motives and methods fall into non-
intersecting spheres?
But why proceed with an enumeration that must be endless?
There are problems of cultures as surely as there are cultures, and
there are cultural traits as surely as there are individual traits. To
minimize the importance of cultural traits is perhaps the best evi-
dence that we possess them in preeminent degree.
What is now most urgently required for ethnology, said Mr. H.
Calderwood some years ago, 11 is that some one should do for that
science what Kant did for philosophy, attempt a scientific separation
of the necessary from the accidental. When this day arrives anthro-
pology, like philosophy, will enter upon a new era of a critical
turning upon itself, and will not lose itself, as previously, in facts,
but find itself there; for facts will be, for it, illustrations of the
laws which they exemplify.
W. D. WALLIS.
PKESNO, CALIF.
A NOTE ON DR. STRONG'S REALISM
THE difficulty I find with Dr. Strong's view (as, set forth in
The Origin of Consciousness} is not so much in the threefold
classification of objects, essences, and egos, as in an insufficient anal-
ysis of the second class, "essences" or rather of one subdivision of
that class.
The essence of a thing, as I understand him, is its "what," as dis-
tinguished from its existence, the same whether it exists or not, its
quality or character, or, as one might say, its nature or idea. Evi-
philosophique, Vol. 52 (1901) by Bougie", Le Proces de la sociologie biologique
esp. p. 142 et seq.} ; Tarde, La reality sotiale; Berne's I'lndividu et soctete;
Gaston Bichard, Le Eealisme sociologique; and Gustave Le Bon's review of
L'Ann6e sociologique.
11 See his review of E. B. Tylor's Primitive Culture, in Contemporary Be-
view (1872), p. 222.
206 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
dently to ask what the nature of a supposable thing is, and to ask
whether it exists, are distinct exercises of the inind. My difficulty is
with his view of the nature or essence of certain objects, i. e., of a
certain class of essences. I refer to sensible objects, as distinct from
those that can only be thought of, pictured or imagined; their es-
sence seems rto me insufficiently described, or perhaps realized. In-
stances are hot or cold air, sweet or sour-tasting food, fragrant or
ill-smelling flowers, loud or low voices, heavy or light weights, colors
of the various kinds. "What is the essence of an object so far as it is
hot or cold, sweet or sour, fragrant or the reverse, loud or low in
tone, heavy or light, red or green? I get no clear and satisfying
answer from Dr. Strong and so far as he gives an answer I suspect
that in a vital point it is mistaken.
With the general logic of his view, I find no fault at least in this
note. Grant that there are objects independently real (whether in
space and time is perhaps a secondary matter) ; grant that there are
essences of those objects, i. e., their distinct and special character,
separable in thought at least from the objects themselves ; grant even
that the essences may in a sense be real, even if not given, like the
objects themselves that consciousness or awareness or attention
(they are to my mind substantially equivalent expressions) is not
necessary to their being. All the same, the essences of sensible ob-
jects seem to me imperfectly or even, in one particular, incorrectly
stated.
Let me at once indicate my point. Dr. Strong speaks of the
essence "a cold object," or the essence "a [ringing] bell" (p. 40).
He argues that what we wake up to, when consciousness first begins,
is not events or feelings within ourselves, but things outside and I
entirely agree with him. We are primarily aware of sensible objects,
not of our awareness or feeling of them. 1 But what is the nature or
essence of these sensible objects'? Evidently this is a question for
reflection, for analysis the primitive mind probably never consid-
ered it. Indeed, I suspect that the primitive mind was ever more
primitive than Dr. Strong imagines. I doubt if it had any such
distinct notion as ' ' things outside, ' ' for this would imply the notion
of " things inside," and the antithesis of inside ond outside is prob-
ably an acquired one. I doubt even if it had any notion of objects
as distinct from subjects. What it had, I suspect, was simply ex-
periences like cold, hot, loud, soft, sweet, sour, hard, heavy, red,
green, without distinguishing them from itself, or itself from them
there being no separate self as yet from which they could be distin-
1 ' ' No metaphysical doctrine could be empirically more false than that which
says that our earliest, our primary objects are psychic states" (p. 40).
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 207
guished. I doubt even if it could be said, when thinking of them, to
posit their existence, for this implies doubt, questioning, and is an
act of judgment. There were simply cold, hot, etc., etc., and: outside,
inside, existence, etc., were predicates born of later reflection. But
apart from all this, which is mostly if not entirely speculation, what
does the essence "a cold object" or "a sounding bell" mean to us
now or, to visualize the question more distinctly, what is the es-
sence of an object so far as it is cold, or of a bell so far as it sounds
or more simply still, what is the essence cold or loud ?
Other people 's consciousness may differ from mine, but so far as
I can get any clear idea of what I mean when I speak of cold, it is a
certain sort of feeling something I may have at times or I may
think of others as having, but in either case feeling, and when at-
tributed to beings without power of feeling (if there are any),
meaning little or nothing. A cold object then is one that gives me
this feeling, when I am anywise in contact with it, or would if I
were. I am aware that many people think that the cold is in the ob-
ject and would be there whether any one had a corresponding feel-
ing or not ; but this, to my mind, is simply a very pardonable con-
fusion, doing no practical harm and probably practically useful, and
therefore not worth disputing about with those without scientific
interest in the subject. In speaking in this way I do not deny, but
rather assert that there is an object, i. e., something independent of
me which somehow produces or excites the feeling in me.
So with the sound of the bell, with odors, with tastes, with re-
sistances, pressures or weigh ts they are my (or some one's) feel-
ings, sensations, immediate experiences, not anything outside me
which could exist by itself. The feelings are of very different kinds,
and have themselves all manner of different subdivisions and shades,
but they all have the common quality of being feeling, a state of some
one's sensibility and apart from sensibility are meaningless. A feel-
ing is hard to define, perhaps as an elementary kind of thing it is
impossible of definition; but we all experience it without definition
and know pretty well what the word stands for. Dr. Strong says, " A
pain that we did not feel would, we rightly say to ourselves, be no
pain at least for us" (p. 204) f and we may say the same (accord-
ing to my analytical reflection) of cold and sound and even resist-
ance and weight weight unfelt is as little weight as pain unfelt is
pain. Undoubtedly there are things giving me this wide variety of
2 Dr. Strong does indeed in one place (p. 199) speak of a feeling that is not
"felt," but I think he means here introspected (he adds at once "or intro-
spected"), and introspection is an intellectual exercise, connoting consciousness
and attention, while feeling is not. That introspection is something secondary and
not vital to feeling is certainly true.
208 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
sensation the feelings do not come from nothing and the things
must sometimes be very complicated in their inner structure to ac-
count for the varieties and delicate shadings of feeling in us; and
yet the feelings are one thing and the exciting objects are another. 8
Color, it must be admitted, is a more puzzling case. Prima facie
it seems outside us itself a separate reality. We look at it, it is not
our feeling so we instinctively say; and I confess that direct
analysis of our consciousness does not settle the question, as it seems
to the nature of cold or weight ; color may be an independent reality
that we simply come upon. It is somewhat strange, however, that it
is not commonly put among the primary qualities of matter, even by
realistic philosophers, but is classed along with sound as a secondary
quality, i. e., one dependent on relation to sentient beings of some
sort. Dr. Strong says positively enough, "objects appear colored,
but we know that they are not really so that what exists is a ' tex-
ture of insensible parts' " (p. 228) ;* so the grass "is not in fact
green" (p. 100). Now this is as much a violation of our instinctive
belief (common sense), as the assertion that the cold or the weight is
not in the object we naturally believe that we come upon these, as
truly as upon the color. And if we are, as I think, indisputably
under an illusion in these cases, why may we not be in the other? 5
Still argumentation of this sort settles nothing, and I own that in
taking color as a feeling rather than an independent reality, as I
do now, I follow a variety of general considerations (which I will
not go into here), rather than any assured result of introspective
analysis.
But, if I may leave this rather limping statement as to color out
of account, the essence of sensible objects in general comes to be
something like this: they are objects begetting (or giving occasion to,
exciting, evoking I will not say just what is the proper form of ex-
s Just how the objects are related to feelings is another question, perhaps
largely theoretical. Do they cause them, or simply by their action excite them,
acting thus as a stimulus? Professor Woodworth (Psychological Eeview, XXII.,
22) speaks of a percept as an inner reaction to a sensation; I incline to think
that a sensation itself is a reaction to an outside stimulus (I learned the view
from the late Dr. Edmund Montgomery, but it is not uncommon among reflecting
psychologists) .
* Dr. Strong thinks, with the physicists, that ' 'the color is not so much in the
object as in the reflected light " (p. 228) ; but why the reflected light should not
be equally in itself a ' ' texture of insensible parts ' ' I fail to see. The undulatory
theory gives us waves, motion, not light, though they may of course produce
(excite) light in beings like ourselves.
5 William James spoke of red, blue, as feelings along with cold, heat, pleasure
and pain, sound, etc. (Psychology, II., 618 cf. the expressions, ' 'somebody must
feel blueness, etc.," II., 7, "when feeling a color, etc.," II., 113).
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 209
pression) certain feelings or sensations in us ("us" meaning sentient
beings in general, or at least sentient beings of our type, whether
human or subhuman, or, for that matter, superhuman, if there are
any) . The point is that feeling belongs to the essence of sensible ob-
jects; it is a part of their nature or idea; without it, they are not
sensible. There may be objects that are not sensible, not hot or cold,
riot bitter or sweet, not fragrant or noisome, not loud or soft, not
heavy or light, not red or green or of any color, but sensible objects
of these types have feeling as an essential part of them it is not an
addition, but belongs to their being.
So far as I can gather, Dr. Strong does not admit this, or realize
it. He speaks of ' ' objective green ' ' and of the green in sensation, as
if the two were different, the latter a vehicle by which the former is
apprehended by the mind at least so I understand his language on
p. 100. He distinguishes between "sound as an external fact" and
"sound as a feeling" (p. 197 cf. p. 202). So he speaks of "objec-
tive heat" (p. 313). In this case it is possible that he only means
the greater activity of the molecules of an object, which is the objec-
tive basis or counterpart of heat ; but in another place, in referring
to touching a hot object, he distinguishes the heat in the object from
the heat in the touching member, and even says of the savor of a
taste of soup that it may be felt both as a quality of the soup and as
a sensation in the mouth (p. 81). I may lack in fineness of observa-
tion, but I am unable to discriminate between these things. The
heat of the object is my feeling of it (existing perhaps or at least
localizable in my finger) ; if there is any heat properly speaking in
the object, it must be that there is something there feeling it too. So
the savor or quality of the soup is my sensation of it, though it may
have a complication objective basis and very fine work on the part
of the cook have been necessary to make it possible for me. I may be
mistaken in my reading of Dr. Strong's thought, but as I read it, it
seems to involve an unnecessary duplication of things. There is ap-
parently the sensible object outside of us, 6 and then by means of an
elaborate mechanism the same object gets inside us only not the
Cf. the detailed descriptions an p. 93, of such charming simplicity that I
become almost skeptical of my own position as I read them. I only recollect that
the hardness, sweetness, fragrance, etc., described, may possibly after all be es-
sences without reality, and I think to myself that I should rather have them if
only as feelings than a possible ghost. (Cf. the language, p. 175, "The first
character of the essence is that it is not an existence. The essence is, as we have
seen, the object without its existence, and therefore a mere ghost or vision of th
object, the same in sense-perception as in hallucination. ' ')
210 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
object itself, but the essence of it, sensible qualities included, 7 its
existence at this stage of the game being simply an assumption. My
objection is that the nature of those sensitive qualities is not realized,
their essence not perceived. There is no object with its sensible quali-
ties outside us, there is only an object giving (or arousing in) us
certain feelings or sensations which we call its sensible qualities, and
do no harm in so regarding for all the practical purposes of life. In
short, we need no vehicle to convey what is outside to us inside ; we
need only the action of the outside on the inside objects and
sentient beings are enough, and sensible objects are the result of their
interaction. 8 "Essences" are a useful and perhaps necessary dis-
tinction for thought purposes, but they are not a necessity for the
explanation of sensible knowledge (knowledge of sensible things).
It is actual heat, sound, weight, red that we experience in sensation,
not merely the essence of them ; in sensation they have all the reality
they ever have though what lies back of them in the outside object
is another question.
Indeed, the result of Dr. Strong's particular type of realistic
thinking seems to be that we hardly know reality -at all we only
assume it. He does, it is true, say that we perceive not sensibles-
but sensible objects, but it turns out that what he means is not
7 Dr. Strong even speaks of visual or tactile sensations bearing in their own
nature "the impress of the object" (p. 122, italics mine cf. what is said of cor-
respondence in respect of qualities, extension, etc., on p. 112, also p. 140; and of
the visual sensation as "a sort of duplicate or picture of the object" on p. 129),
thus suggesting the copy theory, though it would not be fair to press the
language. Aristotle appears to have had a similar dualism, according to H. W.
B. Joseph (Mind, October, 1910, p. 468), who speaks of his " nation about the
reception in the alffdijT-^ptov of the auffrqrbv eTSos (the eTSos = Dr. Strong 's
"essence"); e. g., in touch, the heat, or cold, which may be said to
be the form of the tangible body, as a state of it, is received in the organ of
touoh by its becoming similarly hot or cold; . . . similarly in hearing, the
Klv-nffis, which is the form, of the sounding body, is reproduced in the av^vro^
djp of the ear. ' '
8 One of Dr. Strong's problems (p. 112) is "How can a sensation or a mental
image convey an essence [i. e., a physical one] ? How, being a psychic state with
different characters and having, as such, one essence, can it cause another essence
to appear!" The problem seems to me to arise from the artificial chasm he has
put between the essences in the first place. The sensible qualities are psychical
essences ab initio. Cold, weight, etc., are as much psychic as pain is, though it
may require a little reflection, Selbsfbesinnung , to realize it. This is not saying,
after Berkeley, that the esse of sensible objects is percipi, nor even that the esse
of sensible qualities is percipi, but simply that the esse of these qualities is sen-
tiri a very different proposition. Feeling and perception are distinct feeling of
itself is not cognitive at all (Dr. Strong uses sentiri as equivalent to cognition or
at least consciousness on p. 195, which I think fails to note its distinguishing
mark) .
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 211
existing sensible objects, but the essence sensible objects. "What
is given in sense-perception is not the object as an existence, but
only the object as an essence" (p. 36). "Given essence and actually
existing object are mutually independent" (p. 51). In this way he
thinks it possible to explain hallucinations, where there is "given-
ness of an object when no object exists" or "perceiving objects
where no objects exist" (pp. 51, 62). However this may be (and
for my own part I think that hallucinations should be classed with
imaginations rather than sense-perceptions), we know, according to
his view, only essences their existence, embodiment in an object,
being an addition and an assumptive one. 9 We act as if there were
real objects that is about all he can say.
All this is in reference to external reality. But is iti possible
that, in accordance with Dr. Strong's method of reasoning, the ques-
tion may be raised as to the reality of our knowledge of psychic
states, such as sensations, pain and pleasure, desire, emotion and
volition? Do we know these things themselves, or only their
essences? "In perception," he says, "the essence and the existence
of the object divide" (p. 40) ; how is it in introspection? "Owing
to the subjective mechanism of the givenness of essences, the truth
of any given act of cognition can only be presumptive" (p. 41)
does this hold only of physical essences ? ' ' Consciousness is only of
essences" (p. 44) is this a general statement?
The question is somewhat intricate and I shall proceed tenta-
tively. That there are the two kinds of essences, in his view, ap-
pears plain ("there are two kinds of essence: the essence 'a physical
object,' which is the kind given in sense-perception, and the essence,
'an emotion,' 'a desire,' 'a feeling of pleasure or pain,' which is the
kind given in introspection," p. 89). In speaking of the visual
after-image (pp. 194 ff.), which he calls a psychical existence, he
says that it is given only as an essence. Moreover, pleasure and
Dr. Strong does indeed speak of knowledge of the object (cf. p. 43), but as
above explained H is really knowledge of its essence; the object itself, the exist-
ing thing is, he repeatedly says, simply assumed, presumed, asserted, affirmed, be-
lieved in. The affirmation is "instinctive" (p. 40); we possess "a well-nigh
irrestible instinct to act as if objects existed" (p. 222). Once he gives a sort of
definition : * ' Cognition is extremely simple ; it is nothing but the givenness of an
essence and the acting as if an object existed" (p. 40). Givenness without affir-
mation being expressly denied to be knowing, the characteristic mark of the latter
comes to be acting as if an object existed (cf. p. Ill, affirmation "is to be ex-
plained as merely the implication of acting as if the object existed"). Instinc-
tive affirmation, then, or even 1 1 acting as if ' ' such is the reduction of knowledge,
and, I am tempted to say, its degradation! Is it not better to keep the honorific
word for what is worthy of it! Dr. Strong, even speaks of "erroneous cogni-
tion" (p. 41). This to me is something like "false truths" or is it only a
question of terminology?
212 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
pain, emotion and will are in this respect put on a par with it
(p. 95) so apparently they, too, are given only as essences (all
this in connection with argument for another purpose, but the im-
plications seem to be as stated). On p. 194 (cf. p. 199), he distinctly
asks the question, is introspection "dependent on a mechanism
analogous to that underlying perception cognition?" As nearly as
I can make out, the answer is affirmative, with a possible exception.
There may be direct cognizance of a feeling for the instant it lasts
(so I interpret a parenthetical explanation on p. 200), but this sort
of cognition is practically negligible, for the next instant the feel-
ing may be gone and the cognition of it be possible only through
memory. 10 Now in memory, the object, i. e., in this case, the feel-
ing is only given as a mental image, and it is through this primary
memory-image that introspective (as distinct from perceptive) cog-
nition takes place. It would appear then that to this extent intro-
spection is vehicular like sense-perception images, essences, not the
things themselves are what is given. "The feeling is given by
means of a vehicle, which is the primary memory-image" such is
his language (p. 207). He enlarges on the fact that the image in
this case is a repetition of the feeling with almost equal vividness,
so that the vehicle is adapted to render the object with almost per-
fect adequacy (p. 208, cf. p. 231) ; still the vehicle is different from
the object, and we only know the latter through the former, not
directly. Indeed, our cognition may in this way not only be incom-
plete, but (to retain Dr. Strong's use of language) erroneous. There
may be imaginary feelings. "In truth," he says, "there is as much
difference between an imaginary pain and ai real one as there is
between an imaginary horse and a real horse" (p. 90). Yet the
essences of an imaginary pain and a real one are the same, i. e.,
essences are no evidence of existence and essences are all we directly
know. When we speak of knowing pain, then, what we mean is
that we know the essence pain and simply assume its existence.
Either that, or knowing an imaginary pain and knowing a real one
are the same thing "knowing" here meaning a certain sort of in-
tellectual act or relation introspective of the reality of its object, in
accordance with the sense in which Dr. Strong and many others
appear to use the term at the present time. 11 I do not wish to press
this line of criticism and am only developing what seems to be a
matter of fact, the logical implication of his general view, and am
10 The interesting psychological refinements as to how memory is possible,
its intimate nature (pp. 199 ff), I pass over.
11 1 say "appear," for sometimes (as on p. 220) Dr. Strong uses cognition
in the stricter sense, speaking of cognition as "really such," i. e., with an object
really there, ' ' there as it appears to be. ' '
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 213
open to correction. His thinking is infinitely refined, and I may
miss some of its nuances.
Is not the trouble (so far as there is trouble I do not wish to
be too dogmatic) with the vehicular theory itself? The alterna-
tive it involves "is either to 'be skeptics or to take things on trust"
(p. 222). But do we need to take feelings on trust, knowing only
their essence, not their reality? I think not. Do we need to take
cold, hot, sweet, sour, loud, soft, heavy, light, red, blue, on trust?
I think equally not. And these being real, directly real, may they
not involve other things, which if not directly may be equally real
by real in all cases meaning existing independently of cognition
of them, or of 'Consciousness or thought or perception or whatever
the specific intellectual exercise may be? Essences are a valuable
distinction, as I have said, for thought-purposes, but as such, i. e.,
as separable from reality, they exist only in thought, and have no
part in an ontological or epistemological explanation of things. 12
And yet I may add that with the intention of Dr. Strong to
develop a tenable critical realistic doctrine I am in entire sympathy.
I could even use some expressions of his as my own. He speaks of
the "power of the object to evoke" the feeling (p. 199) this, said
of the "tertiary" qualities of external objects, such as "fearful,"
"hateful," "soothing," is what I should say in connection with the
sensible qualities that have been under discussion. So when he says,
"the object known is actually there at the moment acting on the
senses, and . . . determining by its action the character of the psychic
state" (p. 113), I quite agree. So also when he speaks of "states of
our sensibility" as "symbols of objects," or of the sensation as the
"index" of the object these being for practical purposes I agree.
I should agree, too, entirely with the remark, "sense-perception is
a relatively external way of knowing, which shows us the relations
of things but not their inner nature" (p. 125) a remark which I
consider very pregnant for future theoretic construction.
I have, of course, dealt and that imperfectly with only one of
the lines of thought, and perhaps a subsidiary one, in this rich and
many-sided volume.
WILLIAM M. SALTER.
WASHINGTON, D. C.
12 Under ' ' Requirements of Logic ' ' Dr. Strong puts ' ' the object must be
kept free from admixture with the psychic state; " but if sensation, feeling, is
included under "psychic state," the requirement is pure assumption. So under
' ' Eequirements of Psychology ' ' he puts ' ' The knowing must be vehicular ' ' (pp.
188-89). But with all respect to Dr. Strong, I incline to say of these "musts"
what David Friedrich Strauss said of the "Christian consciousness," which
apologists of his day sometimes sought to make normative over the results of
scientific criticism of the Bible, mulier taceat in ecclesia.
214 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
THE LOGICAL STATUS OF ELEMENTARY AND
REFLECTIVE JUDGMENTS
FOR traditional and modern logic alike, judgment is the unit of
thought. In judging, we synthesize ideas in such a way as
to produce in the mind a relational structure which corresponds to
some relational structure in the objective world. This is expressed
in various ways, and with varying implications; but in general,
judgment may be regarded indifferently as the reference of an ideal
content to reality, or as the apprehension of real relations. From
the psychological side, it is a resultant of a series of complex proc-
esses, expressed by calling it a ''synthesis of ideas;" from the epis-
temological side, it "refers to reality," or apprehends relations
which are objective.
So far, traditional and modern logic may be said to agree. But
a difference soon develops. For traditional logic, all thought is of
this general kind. For modern logic, only a small part of our
thinking falls within this field, which is treated as the field of * ' ele-
mentary" judgment. The modern viewpoint in logic, as in other
sciences, is fundamentally skeptical, critical, and reflective; and for
the modern logician, the vast majority of our judgments belong to
the field of thought about thought, reflection upon method, critical
or reflective judgment, which only mediately, if at all, is concerned
with a reality beyond that of the mind itself. Expressed technic-
ally, traditional logic recognizes only the Urteil, while modern logic
recognizes the Beurteilung as well as the Urteil.
The object of the present paper is to inquire whether this dis-
tinction between traditional and modern logic should not be carried
still further whether the Urteil should not be relegated entirely to
traditional logic, and modern logic recognize only the Beurteilung.
If this could be carried through, traditional and modern logic would
no longer have a common term (Urteil}, and their difference of
standpoint would be so plainly marked that no confusion and ap-
parent conflict could arise, as it so patently does at present, e. g., in
the treatment of negation 1 and of hypothetical reasoning.
I
Let us begin with a brief statement of the present practise of
modern logicians, 2 who explicitly recognize both the Urteil and the
Beurteilung. Judgment, according to the general modern view,
i(7/. Lodge, Intro, to Modern Logic, pp. 108-115, and "Negation in tra-
ditional and modern Logic" in Mind, Vol. XXIX, 1920.
%E. g., Bradley, Bosanquet, Wundt, and Erdmann. The distinction is espe-
cially marked in the work of Sigwart.
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 215
arises out of reflection upon sensory experience. The primitive
sensuous consciousness is split up, certain elements are cut off and
fixed by the mind, and 'by the application of such intellectual stand-
ards as identity, difference, and organization, select elements from
the original material are so worked over and reconstructed that they
can be taken up into the intellectual self -consciousness in the form
of concepts or mental counters which can be referred to, or judged
of, Reality, which is supposed to be intelligible through and through,
an ideal individual. Judgment, then, consists in performing intel-
lectual operations upon primitive experience, in reflecting upon this,
in taking it up into self -consciousness.
In this reflection, which constitutes judgment, modern logicians
recognize various stages, such as the perceptual, experiential, sym-
bolic, and transcendent, according as sensory or intellectual ele-
ments predominate. 3 But they also recognize various levels of
" reflection" in a different sense. A perceptual, no less than a
transcendent judgment, is taken up into self -consciousness that is
the nature of all judgment. But there is a further level of " re-
flection," at which we consider, not the data of sensory experience,
but our own judgment about these data, and reflect upon the
method of this judgment, its validity or invalidity, its success or its
failure to bring us in touch with reality. These two levels/ of
reflection are distinguished as the Urteil or elementary judgment,
and the Beurteilung or critical, reflective judgment, respectively.
Let us examine these distinctions a little more closely. In order
to avoid confusion, we must at the outset explicitly recognize in
every judgment, whether elementary or reflective, a two-fold refer-
ence. There is an objective reference on the one hand, and a sub-
jective reference on the other. Thus, at the primary level of re-
flection, in the elementary judgment, I apprehend some objective
relation (A is B, C is not D), and also am at the same time aware
of my apprehension. I am aware that I have judged A to be B;
or if, for any reason, I fail to complete the judgment, I am aware
that I have failed to judge A to (be B. Every judgment, without
prejudice to its numerical unity, has these two aspects, the objective
and the subjective. They differ as consciousness differs from self-
consciousness, as Leben differs from Erleben, or as, in neo-realist
terminology, ''contemplation" differs from "living." On the one
hand, our attention may be focused especially upon the reference to
reality, upon the objective relations. It is the 5-ness of A which
then occupies the foreground of consciousness. We do not consider
that we may be seeing through prejudiced eyes, but assume naively
s Cf. Lodge, ' ' The Division of Judgments, ' ' this JOURNAL, Vol. XV.
(1918), pp. 541-550.
216 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
that it is with the "reality" that we are in contact, that A is with-
out question B. On the other hand, our attention may 'be focused
more particularly upon the subjective side of the judgment, upon
ourselves. "We are then aware that it is we who are recognizing
A to be B. The judgment represents our opinion ; and we raise no
question re its possible validity or invalidity, its relation to some-
thing other than ourselves the "reality."
At the secondary level of reflection, we have lost this naive con-
fidence in the validity of our thinking. We criticize the judgment
itself. Is A, after all, B? Is not that merely our opinion? The
evidence seems to point in that direction; we may, perhaps, pro-
visionally accept (or reject) the hypothesis that A is B. What, at
the primary level, was accepted at its face value, as a "judgment"
or apprehension of objective relations, is now regarded as a "hy-
pothesis." The issue is re-opened, and is left open. We no longer
judge A to be B, but rather: "It seems to me that A is B," "So far
as the evidence goes, it would appear that A is B/' etc. We are
only mediately, if at all in touch with "reality." All judgments
are regarded as man-made, hypothetical, open to doubt.*
It might be urged that we can go further ; that there is a tertiary
level of reflection. We might e. g., criticize such a "judgment
about a hypothesis," and might ask, "Is it true that the evidence
indicates A to be Bf Were we right in judging that we really
thought A to be B? Or was not this also a hypothesis, liable to
error?" Judgment at the second level of reflection is thus seen to
be also hypothetical, man-made, open to doubt. It is true that we
do sometimes re-open a question of critical reflection, and go over
the evidence a second or even a third time. But this is not suffi-
ciently different from judgment at the second level for us to draw
further distinctions and recognize grades of reflection to the nth
degree. In all further reflections, we simply go over the evidence
again, such as it is, and thus re-affirm (or possibly revise) our pre-
vious decision, without much further advance. Unless new evidence
is adduced, it seems best to regard all reflective judgments, all
reconsiderations of evidence, as belonging to the same general level
of reflection, viz., the second, the level of Beurteilung.
II
From the standpoint thus indicated, it may well be asked whether
the theory of judgment at the primary level of reflection ought not
* Here also we have an objective reference, as apprehending at least our
previous decisions or viewpoints as "ideal entities." So too there is a subjec-
tive reference, so far as we are aware that we are dealing with ideal entities,
or mental constructions, rather than with immediately given sensory realities.
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 217
to be rigidly excluded from modern logic. There appear to be two
main grounds on which this exclusion might reasonably be de-
manded. In the first place, it might be urged, modern acceptance
of the second level of reflection has destroyed forever the possibility
of regarding our naive mental processes at the primary level as
judgments in any strict sense. In the second place, it might be
pointed out that contact with reality represents, for modern logic,
an ideal rather than an actual fact. It is not something with which
we start, something with which we are all familiar, 'but is some-
thing with which we hope to end, something with which we hope to
make ourselves familiar. We have not enough knowledge to make an
Urteil, but construct hypotheses, recognized as such, in order grad-
ually to discover, if possible, what "reality" may prove to be. On
both these grounds, the conception of an Urteil, an elementary
judgment in immediate and final knowledge-contact with reality,
would seem to have no possible place in modern logic, though its
place in traditional logic would remain undisturbed and un-
questioned.
Let us consider each of these arguments more closely. If, with
modern logicians generally, we adopt the second level of reflection,
and regard ourselves as only mediately and distantly, if at all, in
knowledge-contact with reality, we are ipso facto excluding from
the class, completed judgment, all results of thought at the primary
level of reflection. We are definitely declaring that these elemen-
tary attempts at judgment are no judgments at all, but are rather
hypotheses, mental constructions, about which the question has still
to be raised, whether they do or do not apply to reality. Until
that question has been raised and decided, one way or the other, we
have not judged. Such cases of jumping to conclusions are, of
course, facts. They are even fairly common. It is not intended to
deny that they are facts. The force of the criticism is directed
solely against recognizing them as completed intellectual operations,
as judgments. Such naive attempts at judgment seem, perhaps, to
be especially the product of animals and young children. Their
beliefs are a matter of custom, of frequent experience, and depend
on the laws of association. They are not yet elevated to the level
at which rational judgment begins, 5 but, as Wundt says, man
reasons seldom, brutes never. The primary level, then, is a matter
for psychology of the thought-processes rather than for logic. At
5C/. Wundt, Logik, 3 e Auflage, p. 74; Erdmann, Logik, 2 e Auflage, pp.
65, 71.
218 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
this level we have general ideas, abstract notions, questions, hy-
potheses. But we have not judgments. 6
In the second place, completed judgment, an act of thought
which definitely places us in final knowledge-contact with reality,
represents, for modern logic, an ideal rather than a fact. It is no
primitive or unreflective judgment, tout, on the contrary, demands
all that we can bring to its service in the shape of deliberation,
reflection, the critical use of scientific method, etc. Ideally, there
is, for modern logic, only one judgment in this sense, the tran-
scendent ideal of Omniscience, and our elementary and superficial
beginnings of thinking are so far from being judgments, that they
are at the opposite pole of thought. If we care to speak of " judg-
ments'' at all, in the sphere of finite human thinking, we can
legitimately refer only to the methodical and critically self-con-
scious attempts which approximate to realizing this ideal of
judgment.
From these considerations, it appears that the modern logician
should, in consistency, exclude from consideration what is called
the elementary judgment, and should recognize as the unit of
thought only the critically reflective judgment, the Beurteilung.
For the modern logician, judgment should be consistently regarded
as the reference of an ideal content, recognized as such, to a reality
beyond the act. The reference to reality should be explicitly rec-
ognized as mediate, far off, a regulative ideal to guide our gradual
improvements upon previous hypotheses, and "judgment" will
mean, not completed judgment, but this progressive advance in con-
sistency and individuality, this taking one step nearer to the indefi-
nitely distant goal.
Ill
If we adopt this viewpoint, we notice at once that, as there is
now no common term (Urteil) to connect us with the teachings of
traditional logic, we are in a position to keep clear of a number
of distressing confusions which have arisen from the lack of a sharp
distinction. In particular, we can escape from the prevalent am-
biguity on the subject of negation, and on the subject of hypothet-
ical reasoning. The negative judgment of traditional logic is the
apprehension of a relation of difference or exclusion. It is, that
is to say, an elementary judgment, exactly on a par with affir-
mation, or the apprehension of a relation of identity or inclusion.
For modern logic, there is no such immediate apprehension of ob-
6 So too in ethics, where a similar difference of levels is found, the ele-
mentary level of <}>vffiirt) dperi} is usually excluded from ethics proper, and is
relegated to psychology.
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 219
jective relations. All critical judgments are systematic, i. e., con-
tain elements both of identity and of difference, inasmuch as they
are mental constructions which approximate to reproducing the
structure of the one completely systematic individual, Reality.
Reflective judgments, then, are neither affirmative nor negative
(except, of course, in linguistic expression), 'but, in virtue of syn-
thesizing those opposite, have transcended their opposition. The
modern doctrine of the subjectivity of negation, then, should be
understood in an entirely different sense from the traditional treat-
ment of negation. It consists, in fact, in the recognition that some
mental construction of ours has failed to bring us into contact with
reality. Understood thus, as referring to widely diverging senses
of the term "judgment," there is no conflict between the traditional
doctrine that the negative Urteil, A is not B, apprehends an ob-
jective relation of difference, and the modern view of the subjective
significance of negation, understood as the Beurteilung that, having
failed to get in touch with reality we are unable to say whether A
is or is not B. For tradition, there is a relation between A and B,
and we apprehend it ; for the moderns there may or may not be a rela-
tion between A and B this point is not disputed, and there is no con-
flict with traditional logic on this head but the naive confidence of
traditional logic has vanished, and we are left with the critical
doubt as to whether we can succeed in establishing any such rela-
tion. By the complete exclusion of the confusing common term,
"elementary judgment," from modern logic, the traditional and
modern viewpoints can be kept distinct, and confusion in the treat-
ment of negation can be avoided. 7
So too in the treatment of hypothetical reasoning, much labor
has been expended in reducing the categorical to the hypothetical
form, and vice versa. For traditional logic, the categorical form is
fundamental, and the hypothetical form expresses the (categorical)
apprehension of the special relation between antecedent and conse-
quent. For modern logic, the formal and linguistic opposition be-
tween categorical and hypothetical is transcended. All judgment
is regarded as containing both categorical and hypothetical ele-
ments, and the naive faith in such an entity as a strictly categorical
judgment has departed forever. Many modern logicians, however,
following in the footsteps of Lotze and Sigwart, retain the cate-
7 E. g., Boyce Gibson (The Problem of Logic, 1908), who tries to combine
traditional logic with modern views, suggests the term "dialytic relation" for
what is apprehended in negation in the modern sense. He even speaks of a
' ' ddalytic relation between S and P, ' ' when he means that we recognize that we
have apprehended no relation between 8 and P. That this is confusing is suffi-
ciently apparent.
220 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
gorical as a superficial and undeveloped form of the hypothetical
judgment, and thus retain, in the new logic, many confusing ele-
ments of the old logic which they wish to supersede. If the term,
"elementary judgment/' with its categorical and hypothetical
forms, is relegated to traditional logic, the more modern attempts
at constructing a tenable theory of the function of logical thinking
can proceed on their path free from the above confusion.
Our general conclusion, then, is that the place of elementary
judgment is strictly to be confined to the body of thought known as
traditional logic, and that, for modern logic, the critical or re-
flective judgment should be regarded as the unit of thought. This
plea is based upon theoretical and practical considerations. From
the standpoint of theory, traditional and modern logic rest upon
distinctly different presuppositions, and should be kept distinct in
the interests of consistency and intellectual clarity. More partic-
ularly, modern logic seems to have no legitimate place for the ele-
mentary judgment. From the standpoint of practise, many confu-
sions arise from the attempt to retain the elementary judgment in
a modern theory, especially in connection with the treatment of
negation and of hypothetical reasoning. In the interests then, both
of theory and of practise, the elementary and reflective judgments
should be regarded as belonging to traditional and modern logic,
respectively.
RUPERT CLENDON LODGE.
UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA.
REVIEWS AND ABSTRACTS OF LITERATURE
Prophets, Poets, and Philosophers of the Ancient World. HENRY
OSBORN TAYLOR. New York: The Macmillan Company. 1919.
Pp. viii + 294.
Under this rather unfortunate title Mr. Taylor has republished
the little volume we knew as Deliverance, but in compensation he
has revised his preface, worthy to rank with The Free Man's Wor-
ship in its perfect Platonic blending of philosophic truth and
beauty. Mr. Taylor here gives us another of his sympathetic in-
terpretations of those Great Ones of the past whose spirit he has
made his own; but he does more than this: he lays bare his own
philosophic convictions, and his philosophy is indeed refreshing to
those who do not feel that the problem of knowledge or the problem
of logic holds all of life's mystery. For he is a humanist who be-
lieves that the soul of man is by far the most wonderful thing in
the universe, since it is the gateway to that ideal realm where alone
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 221
true freedom resides. Mr. Taylor's philosophic creed might well be
pondered by those who feel that the sweeping away of the past is
the necessary prelude to progress. "They who may have died
ages ago are nearer to us than the alien masses among whom we
move. They are the spiritual fathers of us all, and we make our-
selves consciously their sons by coming to know them in their
achieved or striven-for adjustment of themselves with the eternal,
and in their attunement of their desires to human limitations. . . .
Although that which those Ancients reached, or even that which they
tried for, may not be for us, still the contemplation of their efforts is
as the effect of noble sculpture and poetry, bringing something like
the final calm, the emotional purge, of tragedy."
Mr. Taylor reminds those of us who have just found out what
an admirable baking^oven philosophy can be, that, after all, it is
something more than that; it is the process of adjustment between
the human soul and the strange and mysterious world in which it
finds itself. The quest of life, as Margaret Fuller discovered, is
how to accept the universe; for it is in the measure that men are
able to achieve harmony within their souls that they find deliver-
ance from the manifold evils that afflict the unphilosophic mind. It
matters little whether the goal be called adaptation, adjustment,
freedom, the peace of God which passeth understanding; millions
have yearned for it, and the Great Ones of earth are those who
have pointed out the way. Many are the paths, and Mr. Taylor
has spent his life in revealing to us "the way in which our spiritual
ancestors of all times and countries adapted themselves to the fears
and hopes of their natures, thus reaching a freedom of action in
which they accomplished their lives; or, it may be, they did but
find peace; yet brought it forth with such depth of conviction that
their peace became peace for thousands and for millions. ' '
Mr. Taylor himself feels that not the attainment of the ideal,
but its earnest and devoted pursuit, constitutes the true deliverance.
"We are, perhaps, too prone to identify "peace" and spiritual calm
with a state of supine withdrawal from life's storms; yet there are
some of us who know what it is to attain true repose of spirit in
merging ourselves in the ardent pursuit of some great goal envisaged
from afar. There are some who found in whole-hearted devotion
to the cause of the Allies a peace so wondrous and strange that it
sustained them in the bitterest hours of conflict; and there is no
great cause which can not become the deliverer of those who make
it their own. It is this peace that springs from the employment of
all a man's faculties in an ideal purpose that, for Mr. Taylor, and,
we are tempted to add, for all true humanists, is the goal of the
philosophic quest. "The content which the common man finds in
222 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
his daily work or occupation is his practical adjustment, The
strenuous man proceeds more vigorously, and the high-minded man
more ideally, trying to accomplish what seems the best to do, or
attain, or be. This endeavour constitutes his working satisfaction;
herein lies his spiritual freedom his freedom to fulfil his nature,
his release from fear, his actual adjustment with life and the eternal
ways. . . . Our need of the best, and aspiration to win it, is a living
and impelling truth with us, as it was with them. This, whatever
else was valid, presents itself to us as the truth running through all
the adjustments, the attained freedoms of these ancient men. This
primal verity lies first in the need of the endeavor for the end of
happiness and peace. It lies next in the endeavor itself. Who can
say but that each great man, even in this endeavor, may have builded
better than he knew, may have won his good, reached his peace, and
gained perhaps the final truth for man? For ourselves, we have
found no single answer to life's problem other than life itself, its
need-inspired, forward-driving struggle, wherein endeavor is attain-
ment and the path is the goal."
And yet this is not the end of the philosophic quest. "Not
Truth, but the earnest search for Truth," said Lessing; yet what
were the search without the hope, nay, the faith, that somewhere,
hidden deep, mayhap, and only to be discovered through some new
and laborious effort, there resided Truth in all her glorious beauty?
"And yet with those ancient seers, as with our weakly faltering
selves, the tensest fibre of the endeavor which is attainment, is the
accompanying vision of a more absolute attainment beyond sheer
endeavor the hope for some of them and some of us of a divine
and eternal verity of attainment standing as the cliff upon which the
waves of our endeavor beat."
Verily, Mr. Taylor is one of that noble band who live in the
eternities in the eternities revealed in the soul of man at its highest.
He is one with those who have beheld the sun, and manfully he
returns to us gazing upon the flitting shadows, with a message of
hope and inspiration, of peace and spiritual freedom a gospel of
Deliverance.
J. H. RANDALL, JB.
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY.
JOURNALS AND NEW BOOKS
BEVUE PHILOSOPHIQUE. Sept.-Oct,, 1919. L'un, le mul-
tiple, et leurs rapports (pp. 169-190) : CH. DUN AN. -" Continuity is
nothing more than the manifestation of the law of unity-multiplicity
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 223
in the total universe and in all its parts, and in consequence, the
definitive justification of the nativistic method." Habitude et trou-
bles mentaux (specialement dcms certaines psychonevroses) (pp. 191
256) : ALBERT LECLERE. - The first part of this study concerns the
extent of pure mechanism in normal ' ' mentalisation, ' ' and the almost
total reducibility of this mechanism to habit. The second part is
devoted to the examination of the effects of the troubles of pure
mechanism in the various kinds of pathological " mentalisation. ' *
L'art et la religion (pp. 256-296) : CH. LALO.-In the developmental
study of the relations of 'art and religion ''the dominant facts are
the relative independence of the artistic and religious developments ;
the virtual presence of each in the primitive ^differentiation; their
alliance or their proximity rather than their intimate combination in
the successive phases of evolution." L' imagination pure et la pensee
scientifique (pp. 297-321): J. SEGOND. - Intellectual imagination
manifests itself in three forms ; first, in a pure form as the symbolism
which defines it, as in mathematics; second, as pursuing an implicit
symbolism, following the latent analogy of heterogeneous and irre-
ducible images through which it creates laws, as in experimental
science ; thirdly, the intellectual imagination is manifested in a sym-
bolism which characterizes it essentially and appears in a graded
form, a scale of qualities which is the basis of the comparative science
of beings. Analyses et Comptes rendus. Gonzague True, Le retour
a la scolastique: ETIENNE GILSON. Fr. P. Lumbreras, De dubio
methodico Cartesii: ETIENNE GILSON. Helene Metzger, La genese de
la science des cristaux: A. L. C. Seashore, University of Iowa
Studies in Psychology : DR. JEAN PHILIPPE. Revue des Periodiques.
Carpenter, Edward. Pagan and Christian Creeds : Their Origin and
Meaning. New York : Harcourt, Brace & Howe, 1920. Pp. 319.
Gilson, Etienne. Le Thomisme: Introduction au systeme de S.
Thomas d'Aquin. Strasbourg: A. Vix & Cie. 1919. Pp. 174.
6fr.
Myers, Frederic W. H. Human Personality and its Survival of
Bodily Death. London and New York: Longmans, Green & Co.
1919. Pp. xii-f 307. $2.50.
NOTES AND NEWS
A meeting of the Aristotelian Society was held on February 16,
1920, Miss Beatrice Edgell in the chair. Mr. Alexander F. Shand
read a paper on "Impulse, Emotion, and Instinct." The paper is
especially concerned with the relation of the primary emotions to the
224 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
instincts. It starts from the conclusion reached in Book II, Ch. I, of
the author's Foundations of Character, that the emotions are not
rightly regarded as essentially involved in the operation of instincts,
and what are essentially involved are 'impulses'; the primary emo-
tions being commonly aroused when there is delay or obstruction in
the way of instincts, though this is not the only cause of the excite-
ment of emotions. If this be true, the question is, what is the differ-
ence between emotion and impulse, and what value has it? While
under statistical analysis impulses bear a superficial resemblance to
emotions both containing the three fundamental elements, conation,
feeling, cognition, common to all mental facts the principal differ-
ences emphasized by the author center in the functions which im-
pulses and emotions are severally destined to fulfil.
(1) The ' primary' impulses, like the instincts, of which they are
a part, are exclusively concerned with biological ends : the * primary '
emotions, while still pursuing such ends, are not confined to them,
because, in man at least, they acquire other ends.
(2) The primary emotions have more general ends than those of
the primary impulses: thus the impulse connected with an instinct
of concealment is to escape by means of concealment ; but the end of
the emotion of fear is to escape.
(3) The primary emotions have several instincts organized in
their systems for use in different situations; the primary impulse is
limited to the one instinct of which it is the impulse.
(4) Hence the primary emotion has a variability of behavior;
the primary impulse an invariable type of behavior.
(5) The primary emotion has a superior form of organization to
that of primary impulse.
Can we then regard the dispositions of the primary emotions as
complex instincts? Like instincts they are hereditary structures;
but they can not be identified with instincts because they possess a
variability of behavior both in respect of their means and ends which
distinguishes them from instincts. Can we even regard every instinct
as having not merely some emotion to support it in difficulties, but an
emotion which distinguishes it, vaguely or definitely, from all other
instincts? This theory breaks down when applied to the web and
nest-building instincts, and to the locomotory instincts of different
animals, and to many others.
DR. CHRISTINE LADD-FRANKLJN recently lectured on the theory of
color sensation before the Eesearch Club of the Harvard Medical
School.
VOL. XVII, No. 9. APBIL 22, 1920
THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS
PHILOSOPHY AS THE ART OF AFFIXING LABELS 1
I BELIEVE that it was Robert Louis Stevenson who remarked
that man does not live by bread alone; he lives in very large
part by catchwords. These constitute the staff and support of the
spiritual life of mankind. One could write an essay upon the great
services they render to human society, dwelling upon their con*
venience and portability, the readiness with which they may be
exchanged, the comfort and sustenance which they afford to the
spirit, and the great deeds which they have inspired men to per-
form. Truly man does not live by bread alone !
Now feasting upon catchwords, fortunately or unfortunately, is
not confined to the man on the street; the adherents of the schools
are also much addicted to them. The philosophers are said to sus-
tain themselves upon an especially husky and empty variety of such
words, and in feeding upon them gradually to lose the capacity to
enjoy other and more wholesome fare. Not only is this the case,
but these philosophers of the schools seek to set themselves up as
alone possessing the skill and the right to prepare the catchwords
upon which the multitude shall live, for they esteem highly that
which they themselves have made. But the multitude will have
none of them, finding their words empty and bitter, and choose
rather to live upon the smooth and succulent phrases which may
be obtained at a small price in the common market-place.
It is not at this level, however, that a serious impeachment can
be brought against philosophers. For they more than any other
set of men can justly claim to have been awake ito the fallacies that
lie hidden in words and never to have ceased to warn against them,
On the other hand, and largely as a result of philosophical analysis,
it is impossible any longer to treat words with contempt as merely
empty sounds. Words are born in the vital flowing of thoughts,
and, as the organs through which thought secures articulation and
definiteness, they are an organic part of the process itself. There
are the two sides, the domination of words over the mind, and the
1 Read at the meeting of the American Philosophical Association at Ithaca,
December 30, 1919.
225
226 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
indispensable aid which they afford to the mind. The classical
writings of philosophy are full of texts in illustration of these two
forms of relationship. "Men believe that their reason governs
words," says Bacon, "but it is also true that words react upon the
understanding, and this it is that has rendered philosophy and the
sciences sophistical and inactive." "The light of the mind is per-
spicuous words," says Hobbes, "by exact definitions first snuffed
and purged from ambiguity." Philosophy is able to accept both
these statements, and is perhaps beyond the point where it is likely
to profit from external criticism. On the whole, I am inclined to
think that the danger at present is that we shall attach too little
rather than too much importance to our philosophical catchwords,
if we call them such. Principle, nous, idea, substance, continuity,
cause, God, ego, community; what a great price was paid for the
gains summed up in these and similar words, and to what an extent
they uphold the order of our world ! If it is said that these terms
are empty, one may fairly retort, "to him who brings nothing all
things are empty." These words are indeed empty unless they
have received a content through an effort to realize in ourselves the
experiences they sum up. No effort -of mere technical definition
can put meaning and life into them.
While then philosophers are abundantly able, by considerations
such as those mentioned, to meet the superficial criticisms leveled
against them from the outside, they nevertheless feel the peril of
the undertaking in which they are engaged, knowing well that all
great things are as rare as they are difficult. As philosophers there
is an ever recurring need of defining our aims and of examining our
results, in order to free the mind from idols and to see as clearly as
possible both the goal at which we are aiming and the formalistic mo-
tives which tend to draw our minds away from it. The points upon
which I shall touch are all familiar, and I shall confine myself
mainly to suggesting their applicability to the present situation in
philosophy. I should like to have what I say taken as an indication of
a personal conviction, rather than as an attempt to deal systematic-
ally with the underlying philosophical problems.
In the first place, I have come gradually to think more of phi-
losophy as representing an attitude of mind and a level of experi-
ence, and less of it as a "subject" or "science" composed of a body
of propositions to be taught and learned. One gets increasingly
the impression that the great masters, from Plato on, are not domi-
nated by the interests of "schools," but keep close to the literal
ideal of philosophy as love of wisdom, and effort after insight. It
is of course true that all the great philosophers emphasize that phi-
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 227
losophy is a method, a "way" of procedure, but this is not some-
thing secondary to be imposed upon life from the outside for the
sake of establishing certain abstract generalizations, but just a
bringing to consciousness of the principles that are already im-
plicit in experience, and which become evident through its own
power of immanent criticism. That concrete way of the mind is dia-
lectic.
As opposed to this we have eristic, wMch is the art of fighting with
words.
' ' Hit Worten Idsst sich trefflich streiten,
Hit Worten ein System bereiten."
There is surely a danger when philosophy is made formal and
is cultivated exclusively by schoolmen. That is why I urged at the
founding of this Association the desirability of cooperation on a
different basis than that of the professional occupation of many of
its members.
Secondly, I think we are following a false analogy when we seek
to assimilate philosophical inquiry to that of the special sciences,
and to require from philosophy the same form of practical applica-
tion and of definitely marked progress that the latter are supposed
to exhibit. I do not mean thait philosophy has nothing to learn from
the special sciences or that it is able to proceed by ignoring the
results that they obtain. But each form of inquiry must do its own
work, and this can not be achieved by attempts to set up philosophy
as a "science" and to demand of it the form of result that the other
sciences yield. It is certainly justifiable to demand that philosophy
shall be useful, but its use can never consist in supplying new ' * facts ' '
or in providing definite rules of action, but just in vitalizing the
whole of experience by bringing to consciousness the fundamental
relations upon which it rests. I can not help thinking, then, that the
complaint, which I have sometimes heard even within the philosoph-
ical camp, that the subject is lacking in applications, rests upon a con-
fusion of ideas, and that this confusion is largely due to a failure to
distinguish clearly between the aim of science and that of philosophy.
The same is true in principle of the ever-recurring complaint regard-
ing the unprogressive character of philosophy.
Thirdly, philosophy seems to me to fall short of its true in-
fluence and interest through a failure to realize clearly that its
judgments must finally assume a categorical form and bring us to
what is individual and concrete. In general, science takes the
opposite way : its main interest is in analysis, and its constructions
take the form of a system of carefully defined generalized concepts
that serve the purposes of calculation and prediction, but for the
228 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
time seem to be indifferent to the nature of concrete reality. Now
the great practical success of this method has too frequently led to
the overlooking of its limitations, and- to the assumption that its
principles represent the completed form of logical procedure.
When this assumption is accepted, one of two courses is logically
open to philosophy. It may apply as best it can the method of
analysis and classification in terms of some general aspect to the
objects that make up its subject matter; or, secondly, it may aban-
don all claim to logic and appeal for its results to intuition or to
faith, or some alogical form of experiencing. These, as I have said,
are the logical alternatives ; l but in practise it is usual to mingle the
two methods judiciously, to proceed for the most part and in ordi-
nary situations by way of clear and distinct classifications, and to
carry the appeal to the higher court of irrationalism only when the
issues seem to be particularly grave and important.
The first logical alternative was accepted with great enthusiasm
by the philosophers of the eighteenth-century enlightenment. It
was during this period that philosophy as the art of affixing labels
attained its greatest perfection. All mysteries were abolished by
reducing every form of reality to a generalized type, defined in
quite perspicuous terms. But just for this very reason, the con-
crete nature of individuals was hidden from these times. The lit-
erature of the century presents us with "types," the philosophical
writers construct the mind out of generalized conceptions of "im-
pressions" and "simple ideas of reflection," or on the practical side,
in terms of "ambition," "self-love," "benevolence" or reason. 2
This is all an old story; but what I wish to suggest is that the
rationalistic ideals of this former time still tend to give the direction
to our philosophizing. That is, we tend to set before ourselves defi-
nition and formal demonstration as the goal, and to suppose that phi-
losophy consists in classification and characterization. Thus we
undertake to define the Ego, and Consciousness, and Value ; thus we
classify the historical systems of philosophy under various rubrics
like Materialism, Pantheism, Personalism, with something of the feel-
ing that when they are once labeled they are out of our hands and
ready to ship.
I have spoken as if in this classifieatory procedure philosophy
were adopting the procedure of the sciences. That is not quite
true. All genuine science goes beyond abstract classification and
contains an element that is categorical. A careful analysis of sci-
entific procedure, such as that given for example in Mr. Bosanquet's
Logic, brings out the fact that the mind throughout this process is
2C/. G-. H. Sabine, "Hume's Contribution to the Historical Method,"
Philos. Keview, Vol. XV. (1906), pp. 31 ff.
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 229
always returning to what is concretely real. Even when following
the systematic connection of generalized contents, the mind is also
working out the structure of a concrete individuality: scientific
analysis, when taken in its full compass, is seen to disclose to the
mind a compelling form of categorical synthesis. Now I wish to
point out that a philosophy which attempts to imitate the procedure
of the sciences is likely to realize the abstract and hypothetical side
of scientific method, without the saving element of directness and
concreteness. As external reflection, it assumes the object as once
for all given in the generalized concept from which it sets out, and
accordingly does not feel the necessity of returning to the concrete
to transform and vitalize its abstractions. This point calls for more
extended treatment than can here be given to it ; but what has been
said may serve to explain why the generalizations of a philosophy of
this type are thinner and less significant than those of the special
sciences.
The abstractions in which philosophical reflection frequently
issues are those of a logic which presupposes a mechanical separa-
tion between the minds and its objects. The world, or that portion
of it which occupies our thought at any time, is taken as a fixed
datum. Thought plays upon this from the outside, distinguishing
and naming its qualities and aspects in terms of general predicates.
It moves round and round it, but is never able to break its hard
crust and genuinely interpenetrate it. The relation between
thought and its objects is and remains forever external. Thought
is one independent entity, the object is also an independent entity;
one does not need the other in order to complete it.
The sequel to this logical theory is inevitable. If thinking can
not lead us to reality in its concreteness, we must call upon some-
other power of the mind to bring about this result. Feeling, or
immediate intuition, must effect what is impossible for logic. So
for lack, as I believe, of an adequate logic of the thinking mind in
its wholeness, we find distinguished writers of the present day
appealing to a form of experience that lies beyond thought. I
quote a few sentences from the last paragraphs of Professor James
Ward's Naturalism and Agnosticism, for which a parallel might
easily be found in many other modern writers. "This incommen-
surability of the necessary and the contingent, the scientific and the
historical, answers to the difference between validity and reality,
and shows at .the same time that 'reality is richer than thought.'
Thought gives us only 'science,' not existence; we can not, by piling
up propositions, secure the simplest 'position'. Thought, again,
.gives us only the 'universal,' the relational. From the particular,
which is the 'surd' for it ... it must start, but to this particular it
230 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
can never return save by traversing an interminable series" (Vol.
II., p. 282).
I can not now undertake to state fully the reasons why I think
such a conclusion unsatisfactory. It is perhaps enough at present
to say that it fails because it does not accept the view of the mind
in its wholeness as in principle adequate to its work. This, I take
it, is the principle on which all the great classical systems of philos-
ophy are based. We are not then obliged to accept such an account
of thought as that given by Professor Ward, because there is already
in existence a logic more adequate to the process of living experi-
ence which we may fairly claim to be the proper logic of philosophy,
since it is expressed and illustrated in the writings of its greatest his-
torical representatives. That is the logic of the concrete universal
or individual whole.
If it is the task of philosophy to render reality intelligible, and if
reality is ultimately a system of individuals, not of abstract quali-
ties or essences, it would seem to follow that the hope of progress in
philosophy must consist in adopting and applying this method. It
is essential to be quite char as to what we really have a right to
demand from philosophy, as to the form of comprehensibility which
we may legitimately expect. In some of our discussions of late, it
seems to me that there has been set up as the goal of philosophy
something which can never be realized in concrete knowledge. This
is the attainment of a highest generalization, the most abstract label,
under which everything can be brought and in terms of which it may
be denned. Now I think that for philosophy this alluring prospect is
nothing better than mirage, and if we would make progress we must
turn our back upon it. I shall try to indicate very briefly the di-
rection in which philosophy must look if it is to find its real mission.
In attempting to interpret reality philosophy seeks to under-
stand individual natures and individual relationships, and so on one
side it is a return from the generalizations of science to the standpoint
of common-sense. Philosophy is, however, a direct and natural point
of view which has been enriched and rendered coherent by an analysis
that has given to it a consciousness of its own principles ; it is an im-
mediacy which has absorbed the results of mediation. Let it be again
emphasized, however, that philosophy is not an abstract science, but is
a level of life in which we return from analysis and generalization to
a direct seeing of things in their concreteness. Pater remarks that for
Plato the ideas which form the ultimate object of the mind's quest
tend to be thought of as concrete individual things, almost as persons,
to be known and loved. The rationality that philosophy seeks must be
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 231
of the kind that applies to individuals and forms of individuality.
Philosophical insight has as its ideal the type of perfect understand-
ing that arises as a result of long usage between members of an inti-
mate circle of friends. Thus philosophy should help us to feel at home
in our world .as we feel at home in our f amlily. If it can contribute to
this kind understanding that is all which we have any right to
demand.
This conception of philosophical rationality is of course as far
as possible removed from the ideal of bringing everything under one
highest generalization. It seems to me very important that philos-
ophy should disclaim "this false pretense of knowledge" and realize
that the wisdom which is its mission to seek can not consist of gen-
eral formulas in regard to types or typical forms of relationship,
though it may very well find suggestion and instruction in such
formulas.
It seems worth while dwelling upon some of the consequences
which the more concrete view of philosophy carries with it. Where
philosophy derives its ideals of comprehensibility from the special
sciences, it is likely to look forward also to some conception or
formula which will enable it to make or to transform its world.
Pragmatism, we may say, is the natural corollary of this point of
view. But the logic of the concrete universal yields no such prac-
tical rule of action. For it, the first mark of reason consists in the
acceptance of the universe. We may recall Lotze's fine saying that
it is not the business of philosophy to explain how the world is made,
or why there should be a world at all, but to seek to understand the
actual world of which we find ourselves a part. That is surely
enough ! I confess to thinking that some of the so-called philosoph-
ical problems that have occupied our generation are pseudo-prob-
lems, generated by an overstrained and artificial logic, not by any
genuine demands of reason. We are not called on to make a world,
or to fashion it after our heart's desire, but to accept and under-
stand it. Reason implies the acceptance of restraint, the recognition
of an order and constitution of the world which, after all our analyses
and definitions, has just to be accepted thankfully and loved for
better or for worse. It is the only world we have !
Once more, however, it seems necessary to insist that the rejec-
tion of the logic of abstract generalization as final does not imply
that philosophy is to abandon logical method, or that it can follow
any "primrose path" where exact analysis is no longer necessary.
But it does imply that analysis is now to become an instrument rather
than an end, and that its results are to be interpreted in terms of
232 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
the nature and relations of concrete individual wholes. What has no
bearing upon human life and experience, a hypothetical problem
which has no possible concrete reference, is not a legitimate problem
for a sane man. Of course in actual practise one has to learn the
importance of being patient with analyses even when they appear
to deal with situations that have been abstractly defined, or are
stated in terms that are artificially ingenious. But if these are to be
justified as necessary phases of philosophical thinking, the abstrac-
tions finally must be restored and the results evaluated in terms of
their bearing upon the facts of concrete experience.
The central problem of philosophy, then, which must be kept
fundamental and determining, is that of attaining the most complete
and satisfactory level of experience. We are misled by a false ideal
when we attempt to substitute for this concrete demand of the mind
as a whole the demand of an isolated phase of the mind for a special
form of solution. What philosophy is concerned with is the life and
solidarity of the whole. Nettleship in his lectures on Logic quotes
a sentence from Novalis, to which several other writers have since
called attention: " Philosophiren ist dephlegmatisiren, vivificiren."
To philosophize is to get rid of the mind 's phlegm, to vitalize experi-
ence by raising it to a higher power. It is to forsake the letter for
the spirit, or rather to discover the spirit in the letter. The notion
that thought or theory carries us away from the real is hard to
eradicate, because, as we have seen, it supports itself on the view that
thinking is nothing but abstract generalization. But generalization,
when it represents serious thinking, is also a process of defining and
bringing to light the nature of individuality. "Generalization,"
writes Pater, "whatever Platonists, or Plato himself at mistaken
moments, may have to say about it, is a method, not of obliterating
the concrete phenomenon, but of enriching it with the joint per-
spective, the significance, the expressiveness, of all other things be-
sides." That is true, but only when the generalization is the ex-
pression of thinking that goes beyond bare identity and retains
within itself the life of the differences and distinctions of the con-
crete objects of experience. Then it does not carry us away to a
gray world of shadows, but endows the particular objects of experi-
ence with new life and individuality.
Thus the process of thought is not something outside of or apart
from the process of experience, but is the moving force and spirit
of the whole. The logic of philosophy accordingly is just the prin-
ciples at work in experience and which carry it on towards con-
cretion and individuation. And this, as we have seen, means that
reality is not something given once for all, but something to be dis-
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 233
covered in the process of thought. Thinking is the quest for true
reality, not comfortable reflection about an assured possession. Yet
it is also true that from the beginning there is possession ; the real
is not merely something that is-to j be ; here and now is our absolute,
but it is also a promised land, whose riches we have not yet ex-
hausted.
To philosophize, then, is nothing more strange and recondite than,
in Bacon's phrase, "to use our utmost endeavor toward restoring and
cultivating a just and legitimate familiarity betwixt the mind and
things." It is not external reflection upon an object alien to the
mind, lying isolated and motionless and not itself caught up in the
moving web of the life of thought. And from this it follows that
its ultimate aim is not to classify objects under abstract categories,
but to construct an orderly world in terms of the relations of con-
crete individuals. That is to say, its procedure is not in the di-
rection of abstract generalization, but towards the discovery of
concrete individual wholes, existing as members of a world or
cosmos which is itself a concrete whole. In this we have the funda-
mental distinction between the philosophical form of comprehen-
sibility and that at which the sciences aim, so long at least as we
think of scientific analysis as interested only in supplying instru-
ments of practise. The scientist, as such, is likely to find the sig-
nificance of his thinking only in the series of correlations between
universals that his analysis has brought to light; he does not
usually notice that the process has yielded a synthetic result, that
through it the form and structure of an individual whole has been
brought to light. Now it is just in holding fast to the synthetic re-
sults of thought that philosophy returns to what is individual and
concrete. Its goal is the synoptic vision, seeing things whole.
But it may be asked what is the form and principle of this whole-
ness ? It is not something chaotic or capricious, for it is the outcome
of analysis and definition, or rather of a synthesis into which analy-
sis has entered as a defining factor. Nor does it exist in the form of
a series of abstract qualities, for this is pure externality and nega-
tivity, and in itself incapable of completeness. But its order is that
of a many-sided 'and systematic relation between real beings whose
place and functions are revealed and made intelligible through the
experimental life that is rea-son. It is insight into this order that we
demand from philosophy; not formal proofs, but the raising of our
experience to a higher level of insight so that we shall find more
and more confirmed in detail the postulate of all rational life, "the
unity of the mind with the whole of nature. ' '
J. E. CREIGHTON.
CORNELL UNIVERSITY.
234 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
A VIA MEDIA BETWEEN REALISM AND IDEALISM
IT is evident that the various schools of modern philosophy are
drawing together. As of old they point out each other's de-
fects, but recent criticism has also sought to base constructive argu-
ments on premises which they hold in common. It is along such
lines and as the result of such critical construction that progress is
to be made. For this reason N. 0. Lossky 's The Intuitive Basis of
Knowledge 1 is more important than its definite results would indi-
cate. From this point of view it is worth while to examine carefully
its contribution.
As a counterpoise to the system building of the absolute idealism
of the nineteenth century, a critical study of the problems of knowl-
edge has in recent years called a halt in such systematic criticism.
Our metaphysics must for a while wait upon our epistemology.
Lossky therefore considers the recent developments, beginning before
Kant, as a study in critical epistemology. Realism and idealism,
each in varying forms, differ fundamentally not so much in meta-
physics as in epistemology. This is the impression that Lossky
gives, though there is no direct statement to that effect. He there-
fore attempts to meet realism by a careful examination of its theory
of knowledge. Its view, logically developed, would lead to the view
he presents. He considers that realism is right in its insistence on
the reality of the object (so I understand him). Idealism also is
right in its insistence on the real connection of subject and object.
His statements are rather idealistic than realistic, and his sympathies
are evidently with idealism, but he does make the attempt to meet the
demands of both. ''The known object," he says (p. 225), "is imma-
nent in the process of cognition ; reality itself, life itself, is present in
and experienced through the act of knowing." He continues by say-
ing that knowledge is a discrimination by comparison of the real
world. It is true that there is always something left undiscriminated,
so there is a residue not known. What is known and what is left un-
known evidently differ not at all in essence. Thus Lossky pays his
respects to realism. He goes even further when he says (p. 245),
"The structure of knowledge, i.e., the structure of judgment, does
not in any way determine whether relations or things will be known
in the judgment." The structure of knowledge does not determine
its content. He is also naturally, as an idealist, aware of the bal-
ancing factor. He says (p. 228) that we are immediately aware of
1 N. 0. LOSSKY : The Intuitive Basis of Knowledge. Trans, by N. A.
Duddington. London : Macmillan Co. 1919. Pp. xxix + 420.
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 235
control (subjectivity) and of opposition (objectivity). These two
relations are not exterior to man, nor, it would seem, to the object
controlled or opposing. He goes even further when he asserts (p.
254) that "only that is real which ought to be judged as existing."
The close connection of reality and knowledge he also believes neces-
sary in forming a criterion for truth ; cf. l ' the presence of reality in
knowledge the supreme test of truth" (p. 388). He opposes his
theory to all empiricism or rationalism or critical theories which
isolate the knower from the known. We may conclude this summary
with his statement (p. 404), "The entire content of knowledge is
composed of elements of the real world."
So far, Lossky's distinctive view is almost entirely a matter of
careful statement. The things for which he contends are the essen-
tials in any valid and effective theory of knowledge. They are
therefore common to any constructive theory, either realistic or
idealistic. The real difficulty still remains: how can real objects
enter into a real relation of being known ? This is the crux of pres-
ent-day realism. Upon this the realists are working, but the solution
is not yet agreed upon. In the stress of the conflict against the all-
overshadowing power of the relation of knowledge, the realists have
not sought to vindicate the reality of any relations which enter into
knowledge. This for the idealist is the worst kind of heresy. What-
ever else may be questioned, knowledge is real, and gives or warrants
the giving of the accolade of reality to its contents. Here as before
Lossky stands on middle ground. He does not ignore the problem
as do many of both opposing camps, but presents his own solution.
This solution is his theory of the intuitive basis of knowledge. Intui-
tion, he says (p. 326), is of significance for induction beyond what
has been recognized. We have, he further asserts (p. 414), to con-
struct a theory of knowledge without falling back on the presupposi-
tions, and without using the premises of the special sciences. He
favors (p. 375) the "immediate perception of necessary relations."
He says that the ability to generalize from a single instance argues
in favor of this intuition (p. 335). Relations are thus to import
the word into Lossky's presentation immediately and subjectively
known. They are thus at least as real as the things they relate, and
these things are not real except through the intuition of these rela-
tions to the knowing subject. With Lossky realism has thus scored
at least this, that he feels the need of proving and not merely assert-
ing the reality of relations. In doing this, and analyzing the knowl-
edge of relations, Lossky has presented a somewhat new view of the
process of judgment and knowledge. It is neither pragmatic nor
behavioristic, and deserves more careful study.
236 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
The work of Lossky is directed at the weak point in realism. It
is all very well to vindicate the reality of things apart from relations,
but, if they are too independent, the relations have no necessary rela-
tion to the things related, and no sure reality. If reality is some-
thing that marks out "things," and relations are neither necessary
to things nor things to relations, then relations have not that same
attribute. Relations are not real. Unless, indeed, relations are them-
selves but things, entirely objective. Toward this, though they do
not admit it, realists tend. Yet this backhanded conferring of reality
upon relations does not serve their real purpose. If relations are
things, real because possessing a certain kind of objectivity, how
have they any power to make the things related known to a subject ?
The problem of knowledge is, then, but become the problem of how
relations enter into knowledge and are known. To this problem
Lossky gives importance. His solution, however, is not that of
realism. For him relations are not objects, but are part of the sub-
jective world. Yet they are not the same as the knowing mind. The
relation between knower and known is not constituted by the knower.
Eelations, as not under control, may themselves be objective. Here
it is evident that Lossky attempts the merging of the two concepts,
subject and object, and the reduction of the dualism of practically
all current epistemology to a monism. Though by what name we are
to call the resulting reality he nowhere says. From this "meta-
physics" he turns aside.
For the moment leaving to one side, as does Lossky, the meta-
physics of this solution, it is only fair to consider the promise he
holds out for our theories of knowledge. This promise is that by his
theory reality is plainly shown as an integral part of the world of
knowledge. Relations are real, and are known immediately. Hence
so far reality enters immediately into knowledge. Relations, as a
part of the real world, bring with them their connections and con-
tent. Relations are known as relating things. Hence the things
come necessarily into consciousness. Since the things related are a
necessary part of the reality of the relations, the connection of the
knower and the things known is a necessary connection. Yet we
have not made the things known dependent on the knower. Whether
we have also preserved the externality of relations is another ques-
tion which we shall hold in reserve.
There is a promise also for our logic. Since the relations which
are known are relations in the objective real world, immediate knowl-
edge of those relations gives immediate knowledge of that exterior
world of relations. Induction from relations correctly perceived
and immediately known is just as valid, perhaps more valid, than
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 237
relations known only mediately by deduction. This is disregarding,
as Lossky urges, the premises and methods of the separate sciences
and is a partial return to naive and primitive experimentation.
Again we have to reserve a question. It is valuable, however, what-
ever be the answer to our later question, that the effort is consciously
made to vindicate induction, which in the traditional logic rests
under a decided cloud of inferiority. The progress of the separate
sciences, though Lossky rather scorhs this approach, should have
turned the attention of logicians long since to this untilled and neg-
lected garden. This much we can agree to, that knowledge is neither
simply of things nor of concepts, but of relations between things as
well. These relations it is the province of induction and science to
study. Lossky offers us a possible method for this study, and it is a
method not dependent on the premises of any one of the separate
sciences.
The fundamental defect of Lossky 's view prevents us from at
once accepting his construction as the sought for via media. This
defect is not found in his treatment of any of the problems which
we reserved for later discussion. These enter into the difficulty, but
the main defect is more fundamental. Any knowledge that is vital,
that is "real," is the knowledge possessed by a real being. It is a
relation between two components of reality. I, who exist and am
real, know the floor under my feet, which exists and is real. Any
definition of reality must be large enough to include both knower
and known. Both knower and known being in the real world, any
vital relation between them is also real. Were it not real, it would
not be vital or essentially a part of the same world. Here the prag-
matic aspect enters, for any relation which is not vital is of little
concern. Man as we know him needs knowledge of the objects be-
yond and outside of his own body in order to be what he is. His
relations to those objects are therefore essential to him, and are part
of the real world. It is this consideration which seems to find no
place in Lossky 's presentation.
It is probably this omission which has shut his eyes to the neces-
sity of explaining how relations can be both subject and object, both
active and passive. For him, since the relation "is known," it is
not the subject. It is the object of knowledge. Intuitively known
though it is, it is yet known, and therefore an object of knowledge.
The consistent idealist, for whom relations are subjective, has no
difficulty. They are not the objects but the means of knowledge.
The realist is also in this point consistent. For relations are not
active, not constitutive, therefore they can perfectly well be objects
and passive. For Lossky this ignored problem should have loomed
238 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
large. It is possible to define an aspect of activity which shall be
objective, but this has not been done. Until it is, this real some-
thing, uniting immediately with subjective activity, yet objective;
resisting control, and passive ; and an object of knowledge ; must re-
main very nebulous. It is the crux of the controversy between
idealism and realism, and we can not so easily build the bridge over
the chasm.
It is also to the ignoring of the reality of the knower that the
next defect in the presentation is due. If relations are intuitively
known, part of the active subjective side of life, how are they exter-
nal to the knower ? Unless they are external to the knower, then we
have only a slightly new form of the old idealism. Either the rela-
tions, if they are not external, must actively bring into existence a
relation that vitally and really constitutes the object as known, or
else the knower is forever cut off from the thing-in-itself . The theory
of intuitive perception must be much further analyzed if it is to be
effective. It must be shown that the relations can themselves enter
immediately into consciousness and yet preserve their externality to
the active focus of that consciousness. The theory of knowledge can
not be developed without a careful analysis of the concept of con-
sciousness. Epistemology can not stand as the single stone on which
all philosophical construction is reared. It is but one of several
stones, and a theory must rest on a broader foundation.
Finally there is a defect which runs all through Lossky's work.
It warps his view many times. This is his depreciation of meta-
physics. We all can sympathize with his disdain for a wrong meta-
physics, but that should urge us on to formulate a correct metaphys-
ics. This Lossky does not do. The defects we have just been
considering might have been avoided had Lossky taken into account
the wider aspects of his view. What it means for the knower to be
in immediate contact with reality, as he is in Lossky's view, ,is not
developed. Just what is reality is also left vague. A reality that
can be both active and passive, both mental and material, or enter
into both spheres, needs adequate definition. Ontology can not so
lightly be displaced. What part knowledge plays in the full life is
also not adequately considered. Whether reality may not be known
in other ways than by knowledge is not answered. For many, "mys-
tical knowledge" is not of the same type as ordinary knowledge,
nor that which is "known" real as the material world is real. Is
Lossky's immediate perception mystical or materialistic? To these
questions only a metaphysics can give at all adequate answers, or
even approach a solution.
We have noted the defects. It will perhaps not be so easy to
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 239
correct them. Any detailed correction is beyond our purpose, but
we can try to indicate the line along which correction is possible.
One point in the analysis of the act of knowledge Lossky did not
emphasize. Even if we know some relations immdiately, not all rela-
tions are thereby known. Nor is there in this any proof that all
relations can be so known. Those that are known, or validly inferred
to exist, by other methods than immediate knowledge, are of course
external to the knower. Whether these relations can be conceivably
all immediately known would be a very debatable question. Cer-
tainly we can not assume it. Yet knowledge is a relation. Any
study of the reality of relations must therefore include both medi-
ately and. immediately known relations. The reality of relations
must be so defined that it does not depend on immediate knowledge.
So far the realist must have his way in correcting Lossky 's view.
On the other hand, some relations, if we accept his view, are immedi-
ately known. Our definition of reality must include this case. Not
all relations are objective. Yet they are real relations, and the stone
which I throw into the water is now in the water just because it was
so related to me that by my perception of it I determined to throw
it. My knowledge of its existence did make a difference to it. All
this may be explained in behavioristic terms, but the facts are not
altered. By its relation to me, which relation we call knowledge, the
stone is not now where it was before. This relation, which is active,
is subjective, is immediately known. This activity of the immedi-
ately known relations needs to be stressed more than Lossky has
done, in order that the problem may be more clearly presented. If
his view is to be a real via media, both elements must be at their
strongest.
Further, Lossky has not, that I remember, pointed out that rela-
tions as known are not constitutive of reality. Though entering
directly into mental life, they are there not as subject but as object.
As something I know, they are objects of knowledge. As such, they
are not constitutive of that knowledge. So far again the realist is
justified. Yet once more we need to point out that these relations
are necessarily involved in the real world. They are external, in a
sense, to us, but not to the material objects they relate. These rela-
tions are part of that objective world, rather than, as Lossky at
times tends to consider them, part of the subjective realm. Yet, as
before, the idealist must have his innings. These relations are known
as active. They are not mere shorthand for some mysterious group-
ing of separate things-in-themselves. They, these objectively-known
relations, are what form material systems. They are the significant
part of reality, the "meaning" of things, as Royce used to say. The
240 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
dog goes after the stick I throw because I throw it. The other sticks
on the ground he passes by. It is the relation to me that is signifi-
cant. There is a grave question whether we should not call this sig-
nificant relation the real thing. The material of the stick is of less
importance. By stressing this aspect of his objectively known rela-
tions, Lossky's view would open up a useful course in the bringing
together of behaviorism and idealism.
One further correction remains. Lossky has not clearly pointed
out just what kind of a relation knowledge is. When this is done,
the whole subject will be made much clearer. While there is some-
thing in common between all relations, all schools of thought have
been too ready to take one kind of relation as significant of the whole
without looking into the matter carefully enough. The crux of the
matter is just the point in dispute between idealism and realism.
The discussion has gone too far afield in seeking to establish the ex-
ternality of all relations, or the "meaning" of all existence. What
the epistemologist is concerned with is not all relations nor all exist-
ence, but that existence which is known. This relation is significant
for the existences related. Yet it is not constitutive of either. In
other words, it is not this relation which explains their existence, but
only their connection. It is knowledge which united them. It is not
knowledge which creates them. This union may be the result of
some other relation, but that is not the concern of the theory of
knowledge. Lossky has acted on this principle, but has not stated it
explicitly. With this correction it is possible to make further prog-
ress along our via media.
The value for philosophy of Lossky's work lies just in that field
which he disregards. It is the metaphysical construction which the
correction and adoption of his view makes possible that is of most
significance. In the first place, he has made possible a new approach
to a unified outlook on existence. Since the rise of modern psycho-
logical analysis, the seemingly inherent dualism in knowledge has
for most thinkers made impossible the presentation of the world as a
unit. Knower and known, mental and material, subject and object
have seemed to be irreconcilably on opposite sides of life. To de-
velop Lossky's view of relations, a something which is object yet sub-
ject, known yet immediately part of the knower, we have crossed the
divide and the promised land lies open before us. It is not yet at-
tained, however, and much new construction and analysis must pre-
cede our entering into possesion. For this task the metaphysician
may well build upon Lossky's work.
One other barrier Lossky has demolished. The world of matter,
with its relations and activity, is a world we can really know and
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 241
not merely symbolize. By entering- into immediate connection with
it we deal with reality and know what we are doing. A way has at
last been found to Kant's things-in-themselves. I realize that all
these results are not yet attained and that it will take more than
Lossky's work to make the result sure, but the way has been blazed,
and forward movement is possible.
GEORGE A. BARROW
CHELSEA, MASS.
REVIEWS AND ABSTRACTS OF LITERATURE
Ueber den Einfluss von optischem oder akustischem Reiz und gram-
matikalisclier Form des Reizwortes auf dem Assoziationsvorang.
HANS HUBER. Journ. f. Psychol. u. Neurol., 1918, Vol. 23,
pp. 171-207.
This study is in the main directed at two questions. The first
concerns the difference to be found in free association results accord-
ing to whether the stimulus word has been visually or auditorily
presented. The second concerns the difference to be found between
the usual heterogeneous list of stimulus words, and a homogeneous
one consisting of two-syllable substantives. It will be noted that
this latter feature is among those involved in the important study
published by Loring. 1
Jung's well-known word list, which is heterogeneous, is com-
pared with a two-syllable substantive word list known as the Aschaf-
fenburg-Maier. The first half of each list is used for the visual,
the second 1 for the auditory presentation. There are 50 subjects,
23 men and 27 women; 3 "educated" normal, 28 "uneducated"
normal, 19 under various diagnoses of mental disease. Each ex-
periment is repeated, for examination of errors in "reproduction."
The entire material consists of 19,900 original associations, and the
same number of associations in the reproduction series. Timing
was with the stopwatch, started on the accented syllable of the
stimulus word. 2
i Loring, M. W., ' ' Methods of studying controlled word associations, ' ' Psy-
choUology, 1918, Vol. 1, pp. 369-i28.
2Dunlap (Psycliobiology, 1917, Vol. I., pp. 171-175), has made a significant
comparison of the stopwatch and chronoseope methods in timing. For example,
thirteen stopwatch readings of l,200<r varied from 940<r to l,300<r by the chrono-
seope. Ten stopwatch readings of l,000o- varied between 752<r and 1,3 10a by the
chronoseope. The averages of the chronoseope readings differ from the stopwatch
readings from practically zero to nearly 400o-, the chronoseope readings being uni-
formly shorter. The persons who made the experiments had not, apparently, had
special practise in this use of the stopwatch ; Dunlap believes that reaction habits
for relatively constant period are set up whose effect would be heightened with
practise.
242 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
Results of the more general interest concern the reaction time,
the failures of reproduction, and the incidence of "complex" reac-
tions. 3 The great significance attached by earlier psychoanalytic
writers to the association time is criticized as an exaggeration.
The central tendency of all reaction times in normal individuals
is 2.2 seconds, somewhat longer than Jung's finding, but practically
the same as that which the reviewer has observed. The already ob-
served group difference between women and men is again reported,
buit it is a group difference only. Pathological cases are consider-
ably slower. Except in the best educated subjects, visual presenta-
tion has a retarding influence on the associative process.
In the reproduction experiment the subject is requested to re-
spond with the same word as before, but if the previous response
does not come immediately, to respond freely as in the regular ex-
The reviewer, who has recorded something over 16,000 free associations with
the stopwatch, would assign to an individual association time thus taken, a prob-
able error of one scale division, 200<r. This is about the average amount of dif-
ference between the stopwatch and ehronoseope readings reported in Dunlap's
Table 2 (194<r). It is well to have thus emphasized that differences of this order
are without significance in the comparison of individual stopwatch times. On
the other hand considerable work with the free association time does not involve
such comparisons, but rather very much greater differences in time, or distribu-
tion forms and central tendencies in series of 50 reactions or more; under which
conditions the objections to the stopwatch are materially lessened.
Dunlap's observations should discourage the use of the stopwatch for con-
trolled association work, and lead those using it otherwise to increased care with
it. It should not limit the use or development of the free association method to
the rather particular circumstances where chronoscopic technique is available.
The question is raised of how the association type is affected under the more
artificial conditions of voice-key technique. It would be reasonable to expect a
certain ' l flattening ' ' of the responses, similar to that attributed in Huber 's study
to the influence of visual exposure.
s The presentation of results is complicated as follows: The text states and
rationalizes or interprets certain comparisons between the Jung and the Aschaf-
fenburg-Maier word-lists. The statistical tables given at the end of the article
run counter to these statements, attributing Aschaffenburg-Maier properties to
the Jung, and vice versa. The following quotations are consistent with the figures
here given, but inconsistent with the statistical tables at the end of the article.
"Manner reagieren also rascher nach dem Jungschen Schema, das weibliche
Gesclilecht un ein geringeres rascher nach dem Einheitschema" (p. 178, line 21).
"Das gemischte Schema nach Jung bringt nach unserer Durchschnittsberechnung
25.7%, das einheitliche nach Aschaffenburg-Maier nur 18.1%" (p. 179, line 20;
cf. also p. 196, line 17). Die Anzahl der mit dem Jungschen Schema gewonnenen
Komplexrealctionen vergleicht mit den Eesultaten des Aschaffenburg-Maierschen
Schemas, 10.7% gegen 7.0% (p. 183, line 6; cf. also line 30, and p. 196, line 23).
What seems most probable is that the Jung and Aschaffenburg-Maier headings to
the statistical tables were confused in some way. Further examination of the
tables indicating other discrepancies, the present review is based upon the text
alone.
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 243
periment. For the entire material the percentage of failures in re-
production is 21.9, with the women averaging slightly fewer. Edu-
cated subjects show fewest, pathological the most. Visual and audi-
tory presentation give similar results in this respect.
Record is made of reactions in which the subject gave evidence,
either spontaneously or in response to questioning, of special affec-
tive "complexes." The author's remarks on the relation of these
to the association test are among the most- worth while portions of the
study, critical and suggestive (pp. 180-181). Of the responses 8.8
per cent, were found associated with complexes, central tendencies
being slightly higher for the women (in contrast to their fewer fail-
ures in reproduction), slightly higher also for the educated. This
percentage is of course highest in the pathological material. Visual
and vocal percentages are similar, eontraindicating, in Huberts judg-
ment, special influence of the examiner's personality on the results.
The responses are classified by a simplification of the Jung-Eiklin
schedule, which separates inner associations, outer associations, sound
associations and a residual group. The general average of inner
associations is 73 per cent. There appears no sex difference, or dif-
ference according to education, but it is remarked that the educa-
tional level of the "uneducated" subjects was above the average.
The number of inner associations is substantially unaffected by audi-
tory or visual presentation, though there are slightly more with the
auditory in the uneducated ; it is thought that the greater mental
effort required for them in reading operates to "flatten" the re-
sponses. The Aschaffenburg-Maier list shows somewhat more inner
associations than the Jung, in harmony with its consisting of nouns,
which offer the most fertile field for such associations.
The number of outer 'associations is similar in men and women,
about 19 per cent. As already indicated, they are slightly more fre-
quent with visual presentation, and in the Jung list. Sound associa-
tions are considerably more frequent in men attributed to their
lesser affective reaction to the experiment. They are slightly more
frequent with the visual presentation. The Jung list produces twice
as many sound reactions as the Aschaffenburg-Maier.
The residual group is made up of various infrequent forms of
response, of which the "egocentric" (Jung's definition) number two-
thirds. The greatest number is found in the pathological group
with 10.6 per cent., compared with 6.4 per cent, as the general aver-
age. The egocentric responses themselves number 9.1 per cent, of
the pathological, 2.3 per cent, of the educated, 1.1 per cent, of the
uneducated responses. There are twice as many among the normal
men as among the women, but in the pathological cases, something
244
THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
over twice as many among the women as in the men. Jung also found
fewer egocentric reactions 'among normal women, and thought it due
to a greater repression towards the experimenter. The present ma-
terial bears this out in so fair as one may regard the psychosis as re-
moving repressions of this level.
Classification is made of the responses according to parts of
speech. Forty-seven per cent, of the men's responses are substan-
tives, and 38 per cent, of the women's; which the author believes to
again point to an excess of critical repression among the latter.
There are slightly more with the visual presentation. The Jung and
Aschaffenburg-Maier lists are nearly the same. Adjectival responses
occur to the extent of 32 per cent, in the men and 29 per cent, in the
women, 42 per cent, in the educated and 26 per cent, in the unedu-
cated; there are fewer adjectival responses in the visual experiment
and somewhat more in the Aschaffenburg-Maier word list.
Women respond in 19.2 per cent., men in 14.6 per cent, with
verbs, a difference which is determined by the Aschaffenburg-Maier
word-list. This is again regarded as an expression of the women's
more intense reaction to the experiment. The three educated sub-
jects average only slightly over 4 per cent, of reactions with verbs.
Adverbs and interjections are favored by the women, also by the
Jung word list. Five times as many sentences (or phrases?) are pro-
duced by the women as by the men. This tendency is lessened in
visual presentation. The two word-lists here show no significant dif-
ference. The following is the reviewer's synopsis of this material :
Associations
Educated (as Com-
pared with Unedu-
cated)
Men (as Compared
with Women)
Jung Word-list (as
Compared with the
Aschaflenburg-Maier)
Visual Stimulus
{(as Compared with
Auditory)
Inner
Outer
Similar
Similar
Similar (72.7%)
Similar (19.4%)
Fewer
Slightly more
Somewhat fewer
except in edu-
cated group
Slightly more
Sound
More (also in
Much more
Twice as many
Slightly more
Egocentric
Substantive
Adjective
Verb
pathol. cases)
Twice as many
More (much
fewer in pathol.
cases)
41.8% to 26.3%
Only 4.05%
Normal, twice as
many, pathol.,
less than half
as many
46.7% to 37.8%
32.4% to 29.9%
14.6% to 19.2%
More
Similar
Fewer
A. M. list shows
Nothing signifi-
cant
More
Fewer
Slightly less
Adverb and In-
terjection ....
Pronoun
Fewer
Fewer
Fewer
Doubtful
more in women
More
More
Similar
x
Sentence
Fewer
Only one-fifth as
Doubtful
Fewer
many
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 245
An unfortunate feature of this study is a failure to embody some
of the later work in the association method and the consequent mask-
ing of the light which this excellent material contains for the prob-
lems raised. As was pointed out in Jung 's work, and has been con-
firmed, a most significant feature of the free association method is in
the "predicate" category and its congeners. It is about the "Sach-
licher Typus" and "Pradikattypus" that the recent work on the
method has chiefly centered. This distinction is quite ignored in the
present study, and as the material is presented, the reader can not
work it out for himself. It is a mystery how any one with the knowl-
edge of Jung's work that was evidently at the author's disposal
could have lumped together such diverging mental mechanisms as
are implicit in the original group of ' * inner ' ' associations, or failed to
take effective account of essential similarity of the egocentric and
predicate mechanisms. The original Jung classification was cum-
brous, but its detail showed the relative significance of its constitu-
ents, and the lines on which simplification should take place, in com-
bining groups of similar significance or lack of it. This is far from
what is done in the work of present reference. It goes back to wnere
Jung began and stays there.
"A broader criticism to be made of these two papers is one that
applies to much of the work from their common source. There seems
to be no adequate conception of the significance of variability. In
a school that makes so much of individual psychology, it is regret-
table that individual differences should be all but ignored in a study
whose material must contain much of value for their understand-
ing." These remarks, made years ago of two contributions in the
psychoanalytic Jahrbucli, apply somewhat in the present instance,
though not to the same degree. Huber tabulates his individual
cases, so that one may determine for himself the constancy of central
tendencies, and calls occasional though hardly sufficient attention to
the limited significance of small group differences. Statistical re-
finements manifest rather deliberate headway in the intellectual
sources of this paper. The individual variations are often so large
that the group differences reported have but limited meaning so far
as their individuals are concerned.
F. L. WELLS.
MCLEAN HOSPITAL.
Theology as an Empirical Science. DOUGLAS CLYDE MACINTOSH.
New York: Macmil'ton Co. 1919. Pp. 261.
"If any one is able to make good the assertion that his theology
rests upon valid evidence and sound reasoning, then it appears to
246 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
me that such theology must take its place as a part of science."
This challenge from Huxley is accepted by Professor Macintosh.
1 'It is high time," declares this writer, that the possibility of rest-
ing theology on valid evidence be insisted on. The book under
consideration presses this point, and attempts to show not only
that religious experience at its best has already given us knowledge
of the divine reality, but that this knowledge, by an inductive pro-
cedure, may be developed and amplified.
Until the seventeenth century, theology was traditionalistic, and
unsatisfying because uncritical; in the eighteenth century it was
rationalistic, but lacking in real religious content ; in the nineteenth
century it was mystical or eclectic, and too subjective to gain uni-
versal approval. In the twentieth century may it become scientific ?
It may and will, affirms Professor Macintosh, if religious prag-
matism becomes scientific that is, if it becomes sufficiently critical
to distinguish between that sort of "working" which is its own
verification, and other sorts which are not verifiable. Theology
must become empirical; it must look to religious experience for its
data. And in so doing it must not be confused with the psychology
of religion, with which Leuba and others would identify it. For
the psychology of* religion merely describes one department of
mental activity. Theology as an empirical science must describe,
not religious experience, but the object known through religious
experience.
Scientific theology, like other empirical sciences, will have its
distinctive presupposition. As chemistry assumes the existence of
matter and the possibility of knowledge about it, so empirical theol-
ogy will posit the existence of God, not in a provisional way, as a
working hypothesis, but with assurance, on the basis of religious
experience. This is justifiable, for religious experience has shown
immediately that God is, though what God is may not be clear with-
out reflection. The nature of God is what we are investigating.
Starting with the definition of God as the ultimate object of relig-
ious dependence, or the source of religious deliverance, and find-
ing his data in religious experience at its best, the author endeavors
to show what may be said about the religious object.
A clear appreciation of the practical, common-sense attitude
which prompts the author to make this initial statement that God
is already known as the object of religious dependence is im-
portant for the reader: first, because this attitude is reflected fre-
quently as the argument proceeds, and second, because the latter
part of the book, dealing with theological theory, draws conclusions
using this statement as a major premise. If this first postulate be
granted, the reader will find the remainder of the argument con-
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 247
vincing. Professor Macintosh goes into some detail to make sure
that it is understood. The assumption, he says, is made, as in other
sciences, on the basis of pre-scientific experience with the object. A
pre-botanical experience with plants is necessary before botany
proper begins. And a pre-theological experience of the divine
reality is necessary for theology. This religious intuition, like the
awareness of one's own existence, or of the existence of others, is
an instance of perception in a complex. In the complex of religious
experience at its best the subject empirically intuits an object of
religious dependence which proves to be a source of religious de-
liverance. If this be dogmatism, at least it is scientific. It is
making a common-sense, critically defensible assumption for pur-
poses of investigation. (The author later remarks that the com-
plete justification of this position will be undertaken in a volume to
be called The Problem of Religious Knowledge.}
Beginning then with the knowledge that God is and inquiring
what God is, the author develops his argument under three main
heads: Theology's Presuppositions, Its Data and Laws, and Its
Theory. Along with the existence of God theology presupposes
freedom, which is theoretically possible because of the continuous
flow of time, and morally certain because of our consciousness of
responsibility. Immortality, another presupposition, has never
been proved impossible it is in fact probable, for if the mind is
free and can originate changes in the brain, may it not be suffi-
ciently independent to survive changes in the 'brain?
Under Empirical Data the author discusses revelation. If a
theology can be discovered which will be both natural and revealed,
it will retain the vitality of historic religion while achieving the
validity of science. Religious consciousness at its best means experi-
ence of the religious object as present. Revelation and religious
perception thus become correlative terms. In the life of Jesus we
find the supreme justification of experimental religion. For the
secret of his power was his spiritual preparedness, which means his
right relation to the object of his religious experience. Jesus 's life is
revelation because through it we understand what God 's nature must
be. And the Christian experience of salvation is revelation in that it
shows how all things are possible to the man who keeps his religious
adjustments in order.
Under the head of Theological Theory the author infers the
morally ideal character of God since on practical religious grounds
God must be, rationally He may be, and in religion at its best He
is found to be sufficient for man's religious needs. In the same
way we may reason that God is omnipotent in the sense of being
able to do all that man needs to have done for him by divine power ;
248 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
with God all things that faith has the right to demand are possible.
Similarly, He must be omniscient, self-dependent and a unity. We
know that prayer is always answered, for we know that there is a
dependable response to the right religious adjustment. Eschato-
logically, empirical theology looks for the increasing influence of
the Christian attitude and spirit. And with regard to the problem
of evil, it can only say that in the best possible kind of world there
must be freedom and so there must foe opportunity for mistakes.
In the Appendix the author sketches an outline of the philosophy
of religion showing the relation of empirical theology to philosophy.
He suggests a method called " Critical Monism" for the solution of
problems of epistemology and psychophysics.
The theology thus presented has attempted, by a synthesis of
rational and empirical procedures, to relate itself to the data of
religious experience as physical sciences are related to the data of
sense experience. It is a timely, constructive effort to build a work-
able system of doctrine which shall meet the tests of common sense
and critical reflection. It will therefore be especially valuable for
the religious worker who is interested in the philosophic implications
of his belief.
J. S. BlXLEE.
AMHEBST COLLEGE.
JOURNALS AND NEW BOOKS
MIND. October, 1919. Introspection (pp. 385-406) : J. LAIRD. -
' ' It seems both legitimate and necessary to assume that introspection
has the same general characteristics as any other mental process by
means of which we are able to apprehend the truth of fact." The
thesis of this paper is that introspection ought to be regarded as a
kind of cognition, ' ' a kind of observation implying direct acquaint-
ance with its object." The Epistemology of Evolutionary Natural-
ism (pp. 407-426) : R. W. SELLARS. - " Penetrative intuition or literal
inspection of the physical world is impossible. . . . The conformity
between knowledge-content (understood propositions) and deter-
minate being rests upon such a use of revelatory data as to enable us
to gain insight into the determinate structure, capacities, and rela-
tions of physical things." Mr. Joachim's Coherence-Notion of Truth
(pp. 427-435) : A. R. WADIA. - Enumerates and discusses four chief
weaknesses in Joachim's notion of truth. An Ambiguity and Mis-
conception in Plato's Idea of Morality in the Republic (pp. 436-
446) : P. LEON. -The false idea of morality sponsored by Plato is
that the essence of morality consists of * ' the full and harmonious de-
velopment of all the faculties of a man." Seme-Knowledge (II).
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 249
(pp. 446-462) : JAS. WARD. -Shows the continuity between percep-
tual and conceptual knowledge, with especial reference in this article
to the case of spatial order. Discussion: What Does Bergson Mean
by Pure Perception?: J. HARWARD. Critical Notice. C. A. Strong,
The Origin of Consciousness: L. J. RUSSELL. New Books. Will
Durant, Philosophy and the Social Problem: F. C. S. SCHILLER. R.
B. Perry, The Present Conflict of Ideals: C. T. H. WALKER. The
Philosophy of Mr. Bertrand Russell, edited by P. E. B. Jourdain: C.
D. BROAD. Sir Henry Jones, The Principles of Citizenship: C. C. J.
W. John Watson, The State in Peace and War: C. C. J. W. Florian
Znaniecki, Cultural Reality: F. C. S. SCHILLER. Stewart A. Mc-
Dowall, Evolution and the Doctrine of the Trinity: G. G. S. G.
Hefelblower, The Relation of John Locke to English Deism: J. G.
F. C. Constable, Myself and Dreams. Philosophical Periodicals.
Note: The Notion of a General Will: C. D. BROAD.
de Ruggiero, Guido. La Filosofia Contemporanea : Tedesca, Francese,
Anglo-Americana, Italiana. (Seconda edizione. Riveduta
dall'autore). 2 Vols. Bari, Italy: Guis. Laterza & Figli.
1920. Pp. 268, 292. Due volumi, L 15.00.
Trabue, M. R., and Stockbridge, Frank Parker. Measure your Mind :
The Mentimeter and How to Use It. New York: Doubleday,
Page & Co. 1920. Pp. 349. $3.00.
Tridon, Andre. Psychoanalysis: Its History, Theory and Practise.
New York : B. W. Huebsch. 1919. Pp. 272. $2.00.
NOTES AND NEWS
A MEETING of the Aristotelian Society was held March 8, 1920,
Professor Wildon Carr in the chair. Mr. Morris Ginsberg read a
paper on ' ' Is There a General Will ? ' ' The term, general will, has
been used in varying meanings, of which the following are the more
important. The general will comes into being: (1) When every
member of a group has a sentiment of regard for the group as a
whole and identifies his good with the good of the whole group.
(2) When a decision is arrived at by a real integration of differences
and not by a mere blending of individual wishes. (3) It is recog-
nized that society as a whole and the social good can only be com-
mon contents of consciousness in the very highest stages of civiliza-
tion, but it is claimed that there are in sodiety other common con-
tents of a certain permanence and continuity, with the result that
when confronted with the same situation, members of a society ex-
perience the same inner reaction. (4) There is the view of Wundt
250 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
based on an analysis of the mutual implications of presentation
and will and leading to a theory of a series of will-unities of varied
complexity. (5) There is the doctrine of a "real" will worked out
by Professor Bosanquet and other idealists.
All these views, in varying degrees, involve a confusion between
the act of willing which must ail ways be individual and object of
will which may be common. Professor Bosanquet 's view in par-
ticular is based upon a hypostatization of contents and a tendency
to deny the reality of acts of experience. Generally in so far as the
psychological forces operative in society are general, they are not
will, and in so far as there is present self-conscious volition, it is not
general. The state and other associations exhibit a kind of unity,
but this unity is a relation based on community of ideals and pur-
poses and must not be spoken of as a person or will. For the pur-
pose of social theory what is required is not a common self but a
common good. The latter is an ideal and not an existent and must
not be identified with a general will.
THE "Western Philosophical Association held its twentieth annual
meeting at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wis., on April 16
and 17, 1920. We give below a list of the papers read.
Friday, April 16
"What It Means to Be a Living Thing," E. D. Starbuck.
"The Logical Status of Elementary and Reflective Judgments," R.
C. Lodge.
' * Some Lingering Misconceptions of Instrumentalism, " A. W. Moore.
"A Sociological Theory of Knowledge," E. L. Schaub.
"The Chief Assumptions of Democracy," R. W. Sellars.
"The Ethical Import of Nationalism," E. L. Hinman.
"The Concept of State Power," G. H. Sabine.
"International Punishment," A. P. Brogan.
"The Attack on the State" (Presidential address}, Norman Wilde.
April 17
"A Neglected Aspect of Hume's Theory of Ethics," F. C. Sharp.
"A Reversal of Perspective in Ethical Theory," H. W. Stuart.
"Theories of Punitive Justice," E. Faris.
"The Basis of Human Association," H. W. Wright.
"Group Participation the Sociological Principle Par Excellence,"
J. E. Boodin.
"A New Content Course in Philosophy," G. D. Walcott.
AT the request of the New School for Social Research we print
the following announcement of the three Fellowships in Social Re-
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 251
search which they are offering for the academic year 1920-1921 :
"These fellowships carry a stipend of $2,000 per annum each.
Applicants are requested to write letters stating their records, train-
ing and experience, and describing as completely as possible their
subjects and programs of research. Letters should be accompanied
by printed or written evidence of the writer's work and abilities in
his field, and such other documents as the writer may think perti-
nent. Awards will be based on the promise shown of constructive
contributions to the methods or subject matter of any social science.
The last day for receiving applications is May 1, 1920. Successful
applicants are required to be in residence during the period of their
tenure. For further information address Horace M. Kallen or Wes-
ley C. Mitchell, The New School for Social Research, 465 West 23d
Street, New York City, N. Y."
THE Columbia University Summer Session this year will be from
the sixth of July to the thirteenth of August. The following
courses will be given in the Department of Philosophy:
Introductory Courses
Principles of Scientific Method: Dr. H. W. Schneider.
Introduction to Philosophy : Dr. S. P. Lamprecht.
Graduate Courses
Naturalism : Professor W. T. Bush.
The Philosophy of Art : Professor W. T. Bush.
Radical, Conservative and Reactionary Tendencies in Present-day
Morals : Professor W. P. Montague.
Present-day Philosophy and the Problem of Evolution: Professor
W. P. Montague.
The Conceptions and Problems of Personal Idealism: Professor H.
A. Youtz, of Oberlin University.
The Ethical Philosophy of John Dewey : Dr. H. W. Schneider.
British Moral and Political Philosophy: Dr. S. P. Lamprecht.
WE learn from Science that "Lieutenant Schachne Isaacs, for-
merly instructor in psychology at the University of Cincinnati, and
at present psychologist in the Air Service, Medical Research Labor-
atory, Mitchell Field, Long Island, has been awarded the fellow-
ship in psychology offered by the Society for American Fellowships
in French universities. This enables the holder to do graduate work
in the French universities for two years. The purpose of the society
252 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
is to develop an appreciation among American scholars of French
achievements in science and learning. ' '
THE Revue Neo-Scolastique de Philosophie for February, 1920,
contains a clear and well-written article on "Le neo-realisme ameri-
cain, et sa critique de I'ldealisme," be E. Kremer. The author, who
has evidently followed very closely the writings of the American
neo-realists, draws the following interesting conclusion from his
study :
"Les limites d'un article ne nous permettent pas d'apprecier
cette polemique. L 'accord sur la these du realisme ne nous em-
pecherait pas de faire des reserves sur certaines affirmations des
nouveaux philosophes americains. Mais les points de contact avec
les idees thomistes sont trop evidents pour ne pas avoir frappe les
lecteurs de cette Revue. Nous nous contenterons de rappeler le
chapitre des Origines de la psychologie contemporaine du Cardinal
Mercier, consacre a la discussion du principe idealiste. La fecon-
dite de la pensee thomiste si brillamment represented par le fonda-
teur de 1 'Institute de Louvain se manifeste une fois de plus dans
cette confirmation historique : a travers des phases variees, la pensee
contemporaine revient, de tres loin et a son insu, a la sagesse
We have received the February issue of the Archiv fur Geschichte
der Philosophie, edited by Professor Ludwig Stein, with an accom-
panying letter stating that the periodical is revived with the same
motives that prevailed when it was founded in 1887 by Professor
Stein. It is the hope of the editor to continue the international char-
acter of the periodical which characterized its early issues. In the
current number, contributions appear from English, French, Italian
and German authors. The English contributions are : ' * The Develop-
ment of Berkeley's Theism," by A. C. Armstrong of Wesleyan Uni-
versity, and ''The Relation between Collier and Berkeley," by G. A.
Johnston of St. Andrews University.
VOL. XVII, No. 10. MAY 6, 1920
THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS
1
THE LOGICAL IMPLICATES OF THE COMMUNITY
F the ideal human society is an all-inclusive community of indi-
viduals, engaged in mutual cooperation and interpenetrating
one another with mutual affection, a community constituted by and
expressing itself through mutual helpfulness, support and love if
this be the true conception of the real community, then it must
first of all rest upon a common understanding. For cooperation
without understanding is not the voluntary cooperation of free and
rational beings the society of the ant-hill is not a human society;
and love without mutual understanding is an insecure and unstable
passion, disturbed by a restless and consuming anxiety.
There are many kinds and degrees of understanding. An under-
standing may be established and maintained at different levels, and
may be characterized by different degrees of abstractness or con-
creteness. Thus if one says he likes cubist art and appreciates
Wagnerian music, it is one thing to understand his words and their
obvious logical meaning, and quite another thing to appreciate his
feeling. If some one tells me he intends to commit a murder, it is
possible to understand what it is that he inteds to do without in
the least understanding the man himself in his intention. The more
abstract kinds of understanding, constituted as they are by the
ability to grasp the objective meaning of words and their gram-
matical construction, are necessary prerequisites, generally speak-
ing, to the realization of the more concrete kinds of understanding
necessary conditions, but certainly not sufficient conditions. If
we call the more abstract understanding logical, we may speak of
the more concrete understandings under the main heads of esthetic
and ethical understanding.
Esthetic understanding is appreciation, the sensitiveness or
empathy which incorporates in one's own esthetic life the feeling
of another, perhaps with full sympathy, perhaps with a certain
degree of reservation and criticism. In complete moral understand-
ing an act is grasped in its motive or intention, is conceived as a
possibility for oneself, and justified as morally valid. Moral under-
standing is an acknowledgment of the strivings and purposes of our
fellow-men, and a true appreciation of their meaning and value ; it
253
254 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
is the most concrete kind of understanding that life affords, and is,
as such, both a necessary prerequisite for the perfect community,
and the crowning consummation of the struggle for its realization.
In comparison with the fullness and richness of these moral
and esthetic conditions, the merely logical implicates of the com-
munity must inevitably seem thin and abstract, pale and bloodless.
And yet, they are in a certain sense the first to be considered, since
they are logically prior, even though their value be not supreme.
For unless men are capable, in principle, of a logical understand-
ing of one another, they can not understand one another either
esthetically or ethically, since moral and esthetic judgments also
incorporate within them the forms of logical judgments.
The logical tests of thought and its products are: rationality
in the sense of meaningfulness, consistency, and truth. Each fol-
lowing value in this advancing scale includes the previous value,
but not vice versa. The primary test of rationality, as well as the
primary test of consistency, is the principle of identity. This
ancient law is usually formulated in so blind a fashion as itself to
invite misunderstanding, though it is in very truth the parent of
all understanding. In itself it appears to constitute a mere tautol-
ogy; it is its human background and context which gives it sense
and import. But when it is formulated without this reference to its
relevant context, it takes on so trivial and futile an appearance that
its only chance of attaining any importance at all is to be so fortu-
nate as to become the object of attack. Hence it has been its por-
tion to meet with doubt and distortion and attempted refutation,
from the beginning of philosophic time to the dawn of the present
pragmatic day. And yet I believe that the principle of identity can
be so stated as to carry with it both a spontaneous conviction of its
truth and a lively sense of its fundamental importance.
What, then, is the principle of identity? It is a logical prin-
ciple which at one and the same time defines the individual mind's
continuity of thinking, and the social consciousness of a common
thought and a common world. It asserts that meanings of all
kinds, and hence also the corresponding objects, may be apprehended
as identically the same, whether by the same mind at different times,
or by different minds at the same or different times. A is A,
whether I think it yesterday, to-day or to-morrow ; the A of yester-
day can be grasped by to-day's or to-morrow's thought. The pale
consolation claimed by the poet in the lines:.
Gestern liebt ich, DennocTi derik ich
Heute leid ich, Heut' und morgen
Morgen sterb ich; Gern an gestern
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 255
even this sorry consolation can foe the poet's possession only on
sufferance of the abstract logical law of identity! The law of
identity asserts in addition that the universe of discourse is the same
for all minds that really understand each other, and in so far as they
do so understand one another. The conduct of all meaningful
thought, therefore, whether individual or social, requires the validity
of this law as its first condition. If there were only one mind, and
this mind had only one pulse of thought, the law would still be
true; but it would then have lost its meaning and applicability in
practise. But when this single mind begins to conduct its reflec-
tion in time, the possibility of identifying the same becomes an
essential condition of the rationality of its reflection. If there are
two minds, the social aspect of the principle comes into play. It is
a truism to say that there can be no meeting of minds except on
common ground; the existence in the ideal world of identical and
common meanings is the indispensable background which makes the
realization of such a common ground, and of a common world,
possible.
To appreciate fully the truth and importance of this logical prin-
ciple, it is well to make serious trial of the opposite hypothesis. If
a meaning, once entertained, is gone forever, never to return, then
the continuity of thought is broken absolutely; memory becomes a
hollow mockery, like the counterfeit memory-ideas of Hume, dis-
tinguishable only from impressions and imagination-ideas by the
degree of their intensity ; and there is no such thing as mind, though
perhaps there may be psychic processes in plenty. The momentary
experience would be completely isolated, and in the next moment
would be as if it had never been. Neither change nor sameness
could be known. No meanings would remain to measure the change,
and none to identify the sameness. Socially, the denial of the
principle of identity would reflect itself in the frustration of all com-
munication, and the stamping of all attempts to realize social inter-
course as irrational and absurd. These alternatives are of course
intolerable, their acceptance impossible, and their assertion intel-
lectually suicidal. It is precisely this situation which justifies the
recognition of a law of thought as an a priori necessity. The law
of identity in its individual aspect asserts the possibility of an
escape from the ' ' present -moment predicament ; " in its social aspect
it asserts the possibility of an escape from the ''ego-centric predica-
ment," which latter predicament is only a variant of the former.
It scarcely seems necessary to add that the principle of identity
has nothing to do with the sameness of things or persons perduring
in time. The degree and nature of such sameness is, under the
256 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
logical conditions described, a question of ascertainable fact, and
the principle of identity is wholly neutral as between a changing
and an unchanging world. For even if there were no sameness at
all in the objects of knowledge during two successive moments, the
knowledge of this fact could only be ours under the condition that
our meanings retained their identity with themselves, thus marking
for us the terminus a quo and the terminus ad quern of each of the
postulated unceasing changes. The sameness of all objects existing
in time is partial and relative; the sameness of ideal meanings is
absolute. Our grasp of this ideal sameness is of course not absolute,
and our many partial or complete failures involve us in varying
degrees of confusion of thought. But whoever seeks a clear under-
standing must believe that it is logically (and psychologically) pos-
sible, and that it is a rewarder of all who seek it diligently. The
rationality of the search for an understanding with ourselves and
our neighbors, and the absolute logical validity of the principle of
identity, are but the obverse and the converse sides of one and the
same thing.
^ The principle of identity is not the only logical implicate of the
community. It suffices to define the nature of the universal ; but it
does not suffice to define in a more concrete way the nature of the
knowledge which makes conscious cooperation possible, nor does it
imply concretely the nature of the known world in which conscious
cooperation can take place. And naturally, it does not by any
means suffice to define truth. The so-called law of sufficient reason,
however, is a sheaf of principles, each of which takes us a step or
two farther on this road. The vagueness with which this law is
ordinarily formulated and explained is a reproach to logic. It is
not a single law, but conceals under an ambiguous phraseology at
least three distinct principles, each independent of the rest, though
exhibiting with one another a faint analogy, tending perhaps to
explain if not to justify the historical cohesion between them. It
covers, first, the principle of inference: that judgments may be
concatenated into systems of logical interdependence, so that one or
several judgments may serve as the reason for a conclusion. It
covers, second, the principle of causation, which asserts that things
behave in some uniform manner ; and it covers, third, the principle
of teleology, which asserts that there is a reason for all existing
things, so that the universe has a rational meaning. All these prin-
ciples underlie various aspects of the community life. The first
makes experience possible, and the wisdom that comes from experi-
ence. Without it we should be the prey of blind circumstance, and
our neighbors would find our actions unaccountable, lacking in the
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 257
evidence of rational planning. Cooperation could not be conscious,
its success could be only accidental, and its outcome generally sub-
ject to the arbitrary tyranny of the blindly irrational. The second,
namely the principle of causation, makes planning possible from the
objective side, and cooperation between planners; hence it asserts
the possibility of a concrete and essential aspect of all community
life. The teleological principle posits the existence of a valid and
adequate motive for the life of the individual and of the community.
Its negation is the assertion of the doctrine of the Preacher, that all
is vanity and vexation of spirit. The ideal community sets itself
up as a rational aim for human effort, a goal in which no life need
be lost and no striving useless, but where a glorious meaning crowns
every sincere and earnest endeavor.
Is the logical order here described as implicated in the notion
of the community, a datum or a construct, a gift or an achievement ?
At the risk of seeming to straddle both sides of the contemporary
philosophical fence, I must assert my conviction that it is both;
although of course not in identically the same sense. In itself, that
is, in its ideal existence, the logical order is something preexisting;
in its use and application for knowledge and life it is a human
discovery and a human achievement. There is a world of ideas,
timeless and unchanging. It exists for us to apprehend as far as
we can, and to make increasingly effective as an instrumentality of
knowledge. There is a logical order which is prior to the actual
order, and it is for us to mold the actual order by growing into an
increasingly fuller mastery -of the gifts and opportunities afforded
by the ideal order. Its prior existence constitutes the possibility
of the actual fruitful work of human thought in science and in life.
To assert the existence of the logical order is one thing, and to
confound this existence with an individually attained clearness of
conception, or the concrete possession of actual knowledge, is an
entirely different thing. The latter confusion is the distinguishing
mark of what may be called intellectualism in the derogatory sense.
The essence of this error is the identification of potentiality with
actuality; by which identification both categories lose their real
meaning. The " might have been" of the past, and the "may be"
of the future, are under this identification robbed of all resemblance
to themselves, crushed by the bleak tyranny of a necessity, which,
when it plays this role, is no longer a merely logical necessity, but
becomes a sort of fate. The existence of the entire logical order
constitutes only the ideal framework around which the actual
achievements of thought and science and daily life are slowly and
painfully consolidated. The logical order is indeed a limit set
258 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
upon human thought. But it also affords to human thought its
proper task and opportunity. It binds in order to set us free. It
is a perfect law yielding to perfect obedience the reward of freedom.
The fantastic assumption that this logical order is in some mys-
terious way a dramatic achievement of bold and daring pioneering
minds, and so created ad hoc- by them to serve our purposes and de-
sires, is an absurd and self-contradictory assumption. For every
achievement, no matter how original and daring, must at least be the
achievement of something. And if the achievement is a conscious
achievement, this something is present to thought in advance of its
consummation. But since nothing can be identified as being what
it is instead of being something else, without implying the prior
validity of the logical order, the assumption that the logical order
is created in this way is self-contradictory. The normal logical man
discovers the logical order, just as he discovers truth ; it is only the
abnormal logical superman of heated fancy who creates the logical
order, or wills it into being as over against a hostile world, just as
he is also supposed to make the truth to happen or become in verify-
ing it. The logical superman is no less fantastic and unreal than
the moral superman. Instead of acknowledging and obeying the
moral ideals that are to be found for the searching, the latter creates
ideals and "transvalues values." Not content to transcend the
modest idealism of Goethe,
Die Wdhre war schon langst gefunden
Die (Ate Wdhre, fass es an!
not content with making a first discovery of new moral truth,
he creates such truth for himself and for others. They have both
the logical and the moral superman eaten of the fruit of the
of the knowledge of good and evil, and have imagined themselves as
gods. A skeptic once asked whether, if you put in a lie at one end
of the Atlantic cable, it would come out a truth at the other. This
magic trick is the superman's grand accomplishment in the world
of the spirit in the spiritual order, where if anything it is still more
impossible of accomplishment than in the mechanical order of
things !
The extremes of pragmatism and intellectualism are not so very
far apart. Both Kant and. Aristotle suggest that the reason creates
the forms. A pragmatist like Schiller assigns this function to the
will; but if the latter creates the forms of rational knowledge out
of its own resources, then this will and that reason are one in
function and in fact. What saves intellectualists of the type of
Kant and Aristotle from occupying the extreme position, is the
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 259
acknowledgment of a limiting and indeterminate vA.7/, or of an ob-
jective but unknowable ding an sick. The true position appears
to me to be that there is nothing in the forms which is not also in
the things, and that both forms and things are discoveries. The
real meaning of such categories as an indeterminate matter, or an
underlying substance, or an unknown thing in itself, or, as in James
and other moderns, a chaotic and indeterminate flux, is to point
or embody the distinction between logical content and actual exist-
ence. This distinction is not a matter of logical content; actual
existence does not differ from possible or conceived existence in
logical content, but only in the kind of existence, actual existence
being believed in and asserted, while possible existence is only con-
ceived of as possible. But if the forms constitute a human or super-
human contribution to the things, altering them and transforming
them in order to make them knowable, then the resulting knowledge
is not really knowledge of these things, but the knowledge of others,
which have first been made before they are known; the resulting
apprehension, considered as an apprehension of the first order of
things, is a misapprehension. If we create truth, we create it either
under given conditions which limit and modify our creative activi-
ties; or we create it absolutely. But creation of truth under ob-
jective limiting conditions, is not creation, but discovery of truth.
And an absolute creation of truth is not distinguishable from an
absolute creation of illusion or falsehood, as Nietszche so deeply felt
and so eloquently expressed. The arbitrariness of the process
renders nugatory the distinction between the truth and the falsity
of the product. For both truth and falsity are relational categories.
The preexistence of a valid logical order is the first necessary
condition for the realization of the true community. But (shall I
now say fortunately or unfortunately?) it is not the sole or suffi-
cient condition. There is a host of real and ideal conditions, phys-
ical, economic, political, esthetic and moral, all equally indispensable
with the logical. If it be true that to understand is to forgive, then
this principle is true only under the assumption of so concrete a
meaning for the term understanding, that it far transcends any
merely logical interpretation of that category. And the validity of
the logical order is so abstract a condition that it does not carry with
it the actuality of even a logical understanding on the part of any
individual ; so that the realization of a moral and esthetic harmony
is scarcely even foreshadowed in the abstract logical order itself.
It is its identification with this latter goal that mars that otherwise
genial product of Josiah Royce's thought, the doctrine developed
in the Problem of Christianity. The identification which constitutes
260 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
the leading principle of that book, leads inevitably to a static instead
of a dynamic view of life, no matter how earnestly we try to trans-
cend tlhe immobility of the logical essences by introducing into them
the idea of a self-repeating reflection, which can neither create any-
thing new nor change anything old. It leads to a non-moral view of
life; which is natural enough, since it begins by annihilating life.
It can find no real room for either the possibility or the actuality of
error, or of evil. And it reveals its fundamental absurdity in the
final astounding equation of the logical order with the invisible
church universal, a community instinct with the life of the Holy
Spirit ; than which no confusion could be more profound.
The logical order is valid and necessary; the actual order, for
which the logical order furnishes in part the framework, is at one
and the same time a beneficent gift and a moral task for the highest
energies of free men.
DAVID F. SWENSON.
UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA.
INTELLIGENCE AND MENTAL TESTS 1
RATIFYING at least it is to observe that psychologists are be-
ginning to weigh the results of work in mental tests, and to
deplore in these results the almost complete absence of returns pos-
sessing permanent psychological value. And hopeful indeed is the
discovery that the cause of the failure of mental testing to contribute
to the development of psychology is the failure to arrive at an under-
standing of the nature of the materials with which the mental tester
works.* At this point one is moved to comment upon the unhappy
divorce between the labors of those working with mental tests, and
the interpretations of the theoretical psychologist.
The writer fears that we do not carefully enough distinguish be-
tween the traditional speculative psychologist, who based his work
upon assumptions, very remotely, if at all, related to concrete facts,
and the theoretical psychologist who does critically evaluate concrete
psychological facts, and suggests the direction of further observation
of them. 3 Essentially, the theoretical psychologist performs the
function of a consulting scientist. To deny that the theoretical
scientist is a scientist because he does not himself conduct an experi-
1 The thesis here presented constitutes the substance of a paper read before
the Psychological Seminar in the University of Minnesota, 1916-17.
2 Cf. Ruml, this JOURNAL, XVII., p. 57.
3 For a statement concerning the relative position of the theoretical and
practical scientist cf. Eignano, Scientific Synthesis (1918), Ch. 1.
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 261
merit, provided he is possessed of laboratory training, is exactly like
denying that the consulting engineer is an engineer because he does
not himself hold the contract to build a bridge.
The unfortunate consequence of the early assumption of the
applied psychologist, namely, that it was unnecessary to define intel-
ligence clearly, was the uncritical acceptance of the view that intelli-
gence was a permanent entity or a complete faculty. Individuals
were looked upon as analogous to chemical elements, and just as the
latter were each presumed to possess a given chemical affinity for
some other elements, so intelligence was conceived as a metapsycho-
logical property of the person. 4 In general, intelligence was looked
upon as a mental force in some manner related to a body, and which
adjusted the body to certain objects in contact with the body. Mis-
guiding in the extreme appears the analogy referred 1 to, since the
valence of a chemical element is not an occult power, but a fact ob-
served in the combination of elements, that is, the multiple of unit
charges of positive or negative electricity which an element holds.
Unfortunately, however, the infelicitous anthropomorphic attitude
with which psychologists approached both the data of physics and
psychology was responsible for the adoption of a completely unsatis-
factory view concerning the character of intelligence. Now when we
study intelligence as an observed fact we never find any absolute
essence or faculty performing unique kinds of activities. Traces of
such a view in current psychology are probably vestiges of the theo-
logical influence upon science, from the complete rejection of which
psychology would greatly benefit.
Intelligence is really a name or a scientific category which denotes
certain specific forms of definite reactions. Thus, an intelligent act
or intelligent behavior is comparatively a more effective adjustment
response than are other sorts. Justifiable then appears the view of
some psychologists who consider volitional, voluntary, and even habit
acts to be intelligent, while reflexes and original instincts are not. 5
In such a view, the fact of performing an act conditioned and per-
haps improved by past experience constitutes an important factor in
intelligence.
Possessing intelligence is, then, the fact of having acquired suit-
able reaction systems for the purpose of carrying out definite re-
sponses. Expertness is precisely the possession of intelligence in
this sense, and expertness is a product of the interaction of an indi-
4 No doubt the social psychologist would interpret the doctrine of perma-
nent intelligence as a philosophical reflection of divine and natural rights, of
accidentally invested special interests, which developed as a theoretical justifica-
tion of some pecuniary, political or social status quo.
5 This is not to say that reflexes and instincts are unconscious.
262 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
vidual with some particular kind of thing or condition. It is for
this reason that we are willing and unashamed to be unintelligent or
even stupid concerning facts and conditions in which we do not spe-
cialize or in which we are not interested. Says James: 6 "I, who for
the time have staked my all on being a psychologist, am mortified if
others know much more psychology than I. But I am content to
wallow in the grossest ignorance of Greek. ' '
But here the problem arises why it is that, of two individuals who
stake their all upon being lawyers and who receive the same train-
ing, one becomes a better lawyer than the other. Is it because the
one possesses the better innate capacity? Observations of this type
require always extremely careful analysis. In the first place, when
we say a better lawyer we must be careful to keep our psychological
problem clear of the entangling thicket of social conditions and social
judgments. We must remember that, while it may be a mark of
intelligence to enlist the aids necessary to become a good lawyer and
to seize upon every expedient working for social success, such facts
are beside the specific problem of attaining proficiency in the under-
standing and the administration of legal tradition and legal enact-
ments.
That we can not, in such a case, completely avoid this thicket of
social conditions makes us pause. Nothing is more pertinent than
the question as to whether it is not precisely the surrounding condi-
tions which really make, not only for betterness in the social scale,
but also for greater intelligence of any specific sort, since the sur-
roundings offer the occasion to develop more and more relevant re-
sponses for legal situations. Moreover, is it possible to speak of
intelligence at all excepting in terms of definite forms of response
which have been naturally acquired in concrete interaction with defi-
nite forms of stimulating objects? As a matter of fact, when study-
ing concrete behavior the notion of an absolute general ability be-
comes dissipated.
And, further, what can be meant by the same legal training? Is
training merely a casual contact of a person with things producing
an indifferent effect upon him ? Bather, is it not true that any pres-
ent training is a definite characteristic function of a given person
because such training depends upon previous acquisition of reaction
systems ? For this reason it is almost impossible for two individuals
to undergo the same training. This fact is clearly apparent when
we consider the numerous differences in what is commonly miscalled
the same environment of two people, for instance of two members of
the same family. It follows then that if two persons are to have
c Principles of Psychology, I., 310.
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 263
the same training they must have previously acquired the same type
and quantity of reaction patterns which are relevant to the present
situation. In point of fact when we have separated the normal from
the abnormal or feeble-minded person, that is to say, the person of
poor biological stock, we can readily convince ourselves that intelli-
gence is entirely the product of a long series of cumulative trainings.
Nor is it possible to minimize the subtlety and the effectiveness
of our acquisition of reaction patterns. Perhaps this is indicated
most clearly by the fact that much of such acquisition passes for
inherited talent. Confusion of acquired response systems with hypo-
thetical inherited talent is exemplified in the following case. A
child from early infancy is exposed to a musical environment, in
which music and its cultivation are glorified, and as a consequence
develops interests, technique, sentiments, and other forms of reaction
patterns making for musicianship, but, in spite of this development,
is looked upon as an inheritor of musical talent.
And so if talents are essentially acquisitions we must rephrase
some popular expressions so that they will more exactly conform
with the facts. Actors and other men of talent are made more
readily when they are born into a theatrical or other characteristic
environment, than when they are brought into such an environment
after having developed in some alien milieu which made them into
anything but actors. Much light is thrown upon the intricate prob-
lems of intelligence by the consideration that certain of the factors
which contribute to the making of a good actor are common to other
occupations. Clear it is then that the individual previously a ma-
chinist can not receive the same training from an identical law
course as the individual who spent the corresponding time in the
study of political and social history. 7 And so while the machinist
is inferior in legal intelligence we have no indication that he is defi-
cient in native ability.
Turning for a moment to the criterion of intelligence which is
probably most prevalent, namely, that intelligence enables us to ad-
just ourselves to new situations, let us examine what is here meant
by new. Is it not an obvious fact that we are entirely helpless in
the face of a totally new situation? Psychologists unanimously
agree upon this in the dictum that we can not even conceive any-
thing absolutely new. What our intelligence criterion really means,
then, is that, having developed many forms of reaction systems by
contact with surrounding objects and conditions, we can now adapt
ourselves to similar situations without additional learning. The im-
plication here is of course that the intelligent individual is one who
has acquired many of these necessary reaction patterns.
7 We assume of course that the student of history has profited by his study.
264 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
Paradoxical as it may seem, intelligence is so decidedly not an
entity or a faculty, that we may look upon it as being precisely as
much a function (in the mathematical sense) of the environment 8 as
of the person. What is meant is this, that so little in our intelligent
behavior can be traced to an original unacquired factor that we must
accredit the environing circumstances with their full share in the
development of intelligence. And so while it is fundamentally false,
on the surface it yet seems true that women have less intelligence
than men. For you can not find women who are capable of doing
many kinds of work which men can do. The rapidly decreasing
number of such examples offers good evidence that what the lack of
intelligence means in such oases is the absence of opportunity to
develop intelligence, that is to say reaction patterns to perform cer-
tain adaptations to particular kinds of stimulating objects and situa-
tions. Immigrant women are notoriously less intelligent and less
able to adjust themselves to their surroundings than their husbands,
provided always that the former do not become wage earners and
thus embrace the opportunity to develop more intelligence. To the
credit of mental tests be it said that to a considerable extent it was
through them that the superstition of male superiority was exploded.
And let us not forget that it was through the definite study of actual
environmental opportunity for development that the metaphysical be-
lief in the preeminence of the civilized mind was dethroned.
Also we must note that the inferiority of intelligence in women
and in so-called primitive people was not a fact observed, but a reli-
gio-politico-economic pronouncement concerning the relative values
of souls. The writer ventures the opinion that with the passing of
a subjectivistic psychology and its replacement by an extensive study
of concrete human reactions the need for a native intelligence, whether
omnicompetent, multicompetent or merely unicompetent, will disap-
pear. 9 Such an intelligence, whether described as a general faculty
or a multiplicity of specific abilities, belongs with those mysterious
elements, the instincts, to the class of psychological impedimenta
which not only do not add to our understanding of psychological
phenomena, but actually prevent a factual study of them.
And now we must consider what light the work on psychological
tests throws upon the problem of intelligence. A study of the actual
procedure and results of mental tests proves conclusively that such
tests are and can only be designed to measure some performance
whose achievement is the result of a previous interaction of a person
8 In the sense of conditions offering opportunity for developing reaction
systems.
One of the unique products of a soul theory of intelligence is the concep-
tion of innate mental weakness with some specific superior ability.
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 265
and objects (machines materials). It is for this reason that "no
test has any significance for employment purposes until it has been
tried out on employees doing exactly the same kind of work as that
for which new applicants are to be tested later on. 10 Illuminating
in the extreme in this connection is the study of the limitations of
mental tests. What must one conclude from the fact that mental
tests are of no service in selecting executives? Should we say that
mental tests do not attempt to measure intelligence? For surely, if
they did, they could not be applied to any more directly functioning
intelligence than is found in the work of an executive. But to accept
this conclusion would mean giving up the whole problem of measur-
ing intelligence, and this is impossible, for the genuine usefulness
of the tests indicates that there may be degrees of intelligence, the
lower ones of which may be very readily determined. Or should
we say that intelligence is an unknowable thing, at least so far as
tests are concerned, since tests are only useful for acts which have a
definitely standardized form? To the writer it seems that the diffi-
culty is entirely factitious and based upon the misconception that
intelligence is native.
What the inapplicability of tests to the selection of executives
really teaches us is, that all tests are performance tests based upon
definite reaction patterns and not measures of connate capacity.
Now since executive intelligence means the possession of innumerable
and complex reaction systems it is entirely to be expected that the
present development of tests should be still inadequate to meet the
situation. And, further, the student of tests must be always unable
to meet this situation if he persists in the belief that intelligence is
innate, since such a view precludes the investigation of the actual
contributing conditions which make possible complex human adjust-
ments. To mention just one difficulty, the applied psychologist
makes too wide a difference between moral and mental qualities, as
though it were possible completely to separate these when an employ-
ment problem is under investigation. In this connection it is re-
markable to observe upon what slender threads are sometimes hung
the belief in an absolute intelligence factor. Thus the positive corre-
lation between tapping, letter crossing, and other tests is presumed to
be evidence of the presence of such a general intelligence factor.
To differentiate between mental tests and trade tests because the
former measures native ability while the latter measures acquisition
is to make an assumption not warranted by the facts of mental tests. 11
10 Link, Employment Psychology, p. 19.
11 The writer finds encouraging the inclination of psychologists toward a
concrete behavior view as manifest in the tendency to give up the term
"mental tests" in favor of "psychological tests" to cover all work in this field
of psychological application.
266 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
The fact is that the only difference between the two types of tests
lies in the simplicity and definiteness of the latter. It is because the
behavior investigated by the mental as over against the trade tests
shows a greater complexity and variety, and is in general more diffi-
cult to study, that we may draw a definite line between the tests.
One might say, then, that the difference between the intelligence of
an executive and that of a machinist for a student of behavior lies in
the comparative ease with which one can get an objective measure
of the productivity of the latter. The writer is firmly convinced
that with a larger conception of mental tests their value for the selec-
tion of executives may be vastly enhanced.
It may still be urged that the prominent individual differences to
be found in persons must be sought in some unacquired quality in
the person. We have already indicated that the probable source of
such a view is to be found in some metapsychologieal prejudice rather
than in observable facts. But the study of individual differences, it
must be admitted, is fraught with grave perplexities, since in actual
practise it is extremely difficult to ascertain clearly the precise points
at which certain reaction systems constituting personal traits are
actually acquired. Just how an individual has acquired a mathe-
matical or a general scientific or a religious cast of mind is not an
easy matter to determine. For the sake of science, however, we
mustt plead for perseverance contempered with caution.
Nothing is less doubtful than that there are wide differences in
intelligence, and nothing is more certain than that not every one is
capable of mastering a given problem ; but is this saying more than
that intelligence once developed gives one an advantage in that it
now can be employed ? Certain it is also that the advantage one has
over others in the possession of intelligence is due only to a series of
concrete empirical events, once it is admitted that the persons under
discussion are all of normal stock.
When once we determine to abjure the quick and easy way of
accounting for the complex facts of psychological phenomena by re-
ferring them to occult causes or analogical symbols 12 and insist upon
the study of concrete reactions, our way lies open to investigations
which promise satisfactory solutions to our genuine psychological
problems. In the consideration that the psychological reaction pat-
tern is a mode of response of a living organism to complex surround-
ing conditions, we find the suggestion that the prepsychological 18
problem of individual differences lies precisely in the character of
12 Such as Stern 's illegitimate comparison of intelligence and electricity,
is By ' ' prepay chologicar ' is meant any phase of biological functioning at
the basis of the specific reaction pattern.
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 267
the biological stock of the individual. Thus, for example, the neuro-
glandular organization of the person is of enormous influence in the
determination of his psychological conduct. But although there is
an inexhaustible source of such material, it is, as yet, practically un-
touched by scientific investigation. The same importance for the
study of individual differences of action is attached to the perfection
and degree of development of the receptor systems, as for example
the role played by a specific condition of the auditory apparatus in
the total complex of musical ability, or the qualities of the visual
apparatus in mechanical or esthetic drawing. Not only does such
information concerning the biological stock of the individual throw
light upon the differentiation of persons into normal and abnormal,
but it also illuminates the only possible source of inherited individual
traits and differences. Undoubtedly, the complex and complete or-
ganization of the actual human individual when once known to a
satisfactory degree will clear up many important problems of tem-
perament, character, capacity, traits, and genius. The gain involved
in awaiting such factual development is no less, let us repeat, than
the acquisition of definite scientific information as over against un-
founded and useless speculation.
In sum, the failure of the work of mental tests to yield principles
leading to a wider extension of knowledge concerning psychological
phenomena is due to the acceptance of the assumption that intelli-
gence, or what is measured by the tests, is a mental factor and not a
specific mode of adjustmental response. Thus scant attention is
paid to the precise facts upon which the tests have their actual bear-
ing. In consequence the work of mental testing merely leads to more
work, but to no organized accomplishment of definite merit. To
place emphasis upon the actual response as it can be studied will
mean not only the avoidance of necessarily unfruitful attempts to
seize upon a hypothetical faculty, but a positive understanding of
actual psychological phenomena. The new direction which psy-
chology would thus take would make superfluous such speculations
as to whether the organization of the "mind" is such that its acts
are related or unrelated. Instead, we would learn what the facts
seem clearly to indicate, namely, that intelligent acts, as all psycho*
logical acts, must be specific; for our reaction patterns are definite,
concrete responses. But, since our environment is more or less uni-
form and homogeneous, the acquisition of many response patterns
must mean that our general capacity to respond to things is in-
creased. Changes and improvements in the mode of responding to
our surroundings are induced by variations in the objects and their
relations, to which we find it necessary to adapt ourselves. In the
268 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
acquisition of numerous response patterns the person ipso facto takes
on the qualities of general intelligence, among which are variety,
independence, agility, and rapidity of response.
J. R. KANTOR.
UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO.
DR. WILDON CARR'S THEORY OF THE RELATION
BETWEEN BODY AND MIND
DR. CARR'S consideration of the relation between mind and the
body in his presidential address to the Aristotelian Society 1
places the problem in an original setting, and renders still less ten-
able any parallelistic explanation; I should like to offer, however,
a few notes on certain difficulties which still seem to remain in spite
of his thoughtful treatment.
Dr. Carr regards the interaction as occurring between two sys-
tems which are existentially completely disparate "there is no
common factor in psychical and physiological process" (p. 7). At
the same time I do not think that his view of mind as independently
organized, and as responding therefore always as a whole, is as new
as he takes it to be, 2 although I feel convinced that to regard the
interaction as taking place essentially between wholes is the truest
method of approaching the subject.
1. But the specific arguments advanced by Dr. Carr in support
of this general position seem in several respects to lack cogency.
"Consciousness" he affirms, "is the manifestation of an immaterial
object the soul" (p. 9) ; his reason being that "to be conscious or
aware of an object is not to contemplate but to recognize it.
Recognition implies precognition, presupposes memory and con-
structive imagination" (p. 10). But if recognition thus implies
precognition, plainly this again requires a cognition still prior, and
so ad infinitum; nor does this view again agree with the basal as-
sumption as to knowledge which is made by Croce, and which has
received, as is well known, Dr. Carr's own endorsement. 3
Then in rejecting the suggestion that psychical activity is as
such merely a function of the brain, Dr. Carr appears to me to be
unconsciously rather dogmatic; his arguments certainly go a cer-
iProc: 1917-18. p. 1.
2 Cf. } e. g., Bosanquet, Principle of Individuality, pp. 114, 168, 182, and the
further references there. But does not Dr. Carr misinterpret Dr. Haldane's
view of the body as a "perfect machine" (p. 6)? We have only to turn to p.
422 of the same volume to find him asserting that "a living organism differs
from any mechanism which we can construct or conceive."
3 Cf. The Philosophy of Benedetto Croce, ch. III.
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 269
tain length towards supporting his contention, but they are by no
means sufficient for its complete establishment. I am not question-
ing the fact in itself I agree, i. e., that it is not the brain, but mind,
which thinks; but Dr. Carr's proof of this principle does not seem
to be final. He argues that all psychical acts must belong to mind
only, because it always acts as a whole. But it is equally a funda-
mental principle with him that the brain (the body in fact) also
acts as a whole, and that there is neither point-to-point correspond-
ence nor union between them (p. 22), which excludes the possi-
bility, therefore, that any single brain process always results in some
special and restricted psychical activity; and thus it becomes
logically possible for the brain, since it acts (like mind) as one
whole, to produce psychical combinations of any degree of com-
plexity. My contention is not that it ever actually does this, but
that Dr. Carr's argument is in itself as it stands insufficient to prove
its impossibility.
We reach the same conclusion if we consider this point from
another aspect. Even when we admit interaction between brain
and mind acting as wholes, we must still retain a view of their
relation which (on account of their disparate nature) verges very
closely on parallelism; for it is only the ultimate action of each
that affects the other as a whole, while their proximate or immediate
interaction is localized or specialized. I may express this aspect of
the problem better perhaps by saying that ultimate -control by
either mind or body is certainly effected by them as wholes, but that
this is distinct from their specific or detailed activities. If, e. g., I
depress a key with my finger, the total body control is distinct from
the special finger action, although both are necessary; and in much
the same way, the facts both of brain structure and of mind organ-
ization seem to imply that each kind of psychical activity main-
tains a constant relation with one and the same part of the brain.
This need not be a point-to-point or one-to-one relation, but it cer-
tainly seems to take the form of a constant connection between what
may be called the ''organs" of brain and of mind, respectively,
analogous to the special functions peculiar to each organ of the
body itself, even while this acts as a whole.
2. In this respect Dr. Carr's assertion that a rat, although more
cunning, is ' * not better equipped neurologically for its special activi-
ties" than a rabbit (p. 24), seems to be doubtful. I am not certain
what "better neurological equipment" exactly means, but it can not
imply that the higher cerebral centers of the two species present
little or no difference ; for if that is the case, evolution has modified
diversely every bodily and also every mental detail of their constitu-
270 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
tion except these centers, which is an inconceivable supposition.
Dr. Carr refers to the " complexity and quantity of specific (cere-
bral?) contrivances;" and if we compare a tee with a rabbit,
quantity of cerebral substance in itself certainly appears negligible.
But this by no means implies that the relative proportions and effi-
ciency of the various parts of this matter, whatever its quantity, are
equally unimportant. May they not stand somewhat in the same
relation as, e. g., a modern pocket pistol to a blunderbuss? If
again we recall the importance assigned by Bergson to insect in-
stinct, and the strong support always accorded by Dr. Carr himself
to Bergson 's system, his theory of neurological indifference here be-
comes still more remarkable.
3. Somewhat in the same way he misinterprets the relation be-
tween the higher brain centers and skilled action, which he regards
as an instance of "brain development quite disparate from mind
development" (p. 25). The facts, however, seem to support a
directly contrary view. In the first place, the coordination of
skilled movements centers not mainly nor directly in the cerebral
hemispheres, but in the cerebellum and corpus striatum, the control
of the higher tracts over these being but general and supervisory;
and further, the acquirement of skill (as Dr. Carr himself admits)
depends essentially on "the higher cerebral centers," though not
necessarily on those which are predominant in a "mental giant"
without any skill. The function of these is just to educate the
muscular and lower nervous systems to such a degree that they
can act automatically and independently ; the only alternative being
to regard all increase in skill, which quite obviously demands a
higher intelligence of its own special kind, as never in any case a
psychical activity never the operation of mind as a whole. And
to infer that mind development is here wholly disparate is to argue
that the high efficiency of a first-class boat crew proves the absence
of a trainer, when in fact it proves exactly the reverse.
Before passing to what appear still more fundamental difficul-
ties in Dr. Carr's treatment, I may note one or two puzzling dis-
crepancies, which may be no more, however, than inadequacies in
expression. We may contrast then the statement on p. 18, "We
can and do conceive the living body as complete in itself without the
accompaniment of consciousness," with that on p. 20, "It is im-
possible for me to think that my body without my mind is still my
body;" and again (p. 19), the "function of coordination is not
exercised by any specific structure," but (p. 20), "the mechanism
by which coordination is effected can be located in the cerebral
cortex," which, however, is undoubtedly a "structure" highly com-
plicated and "specific."
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 271
4. When we come to consider Dr. Carr's final theory of the
ultimate basis of the interaction between mind and body, it seems to
add nothing whatever to our understanding of the problem; for it
takes the unsatisfying form of an appeal, if not to unknowable, cer-
tainly to unknown or even purely hypothetical, agencies. Psychical
activity, self-organized into mind, and bodily process, also as a
whole, are, while disparate in nature, yet intimately connected in
their activity ; and thought seeks some explanation or ground of this
mysterious union of opposites. Dr. Carr's own conclusion is that
"the forces, whatever they are, which are molding the body are
the identical forces which are forming the mind." 4 But such a
solution of the difficulty is purely formal, abstract, scholastic ; it at
once raises the original question in a new form, for we are com-
pelled to ask what is the nature of these forces, and how, being
identical, do they come to manifest themselves on these absolutely
disparate planes? The incomprehensibility of the concrete phe-
nomena, as we actually find them in experience, is in no degree
removed by the inconceivability of the action of abstractly identical
unknown forces.
A somewhat similar defect characterizes Dr. Carr's reference of
this dual manifestation of mind and brain to an origin in "life as
an undifferentiated unity" (p. 33) ; for even had we experience of
such life and Dr. Carr admits that this does not exist still this
could in no way be an "undifferentiated unity," for such a con-
ception is at once logically inconceivable and existentially impos-
sible. Unity, in any real sense, must in some way be differentiated ;
for the obvious reason that if there be no diversity whatever, neither
can there be any true unity, for unity is essentially the overcoming
of differences if America, e. g., were not differentiated, there could
be no United States. At the most there could be but a featureless
uniformity, which under no conditions can be conceived as the real
origin of the dual world of bodily and mental life. An "undif-
ferentiated unity" then is but a logical chimera; even did it exist,
how could self -differentiation arise within it? Some TTOV <rr<a some
basis of differentiation is indispensable.
Finally, if Dr. Carr is correct in assigning, as their distinctive and
mutually exclusive characters, freedom to mind, and necessity to
the body (p. 31), then it becomes impossible for these to be (as he
regards them) wholly antithetical. For freedom is fundamentally
misconceived when it is regarded as the antithesis of necessity; on
the contrary, it is its logical and inevitable complement; for each
alike can be expressed in terms of determination, or (better) of
* P. 27; italics mine.
272 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
degrees of self-determination. Throughout the universe of concrete
reality, this latter everywhere exists and operates in some degree;
if but slightly, then determination is mainly from without, and
"necessity" reigns; but as the level of internal self-determination
rises, it becomes gradually transformed into "freedom"; and just
as the mind is nowhere wholly free, so the body and the material
universe as a whole are never completely dominated by necessity.
To say therefore with Dr. Carr that one is rigidly determined and
the other free, is to abandon that antithesis between them which is
from the outset indispensable to his whole argument.
J. E. TURNER.
LIVERPOOL, ENG.
REVIEWS AND ABSTRACTS OF LITERATURE
An Introduction to Philosophy. HOLLY ESTIL CUNNINGHAM.
Boston: Richard G. Badger. 1920. Pp. 257.
Time was perhaps still is when an introduction to philosophy
consisted in casting the young, unsuspecting mind overboard from
the craft of everyday thought into the vast and vague deep of
fundamental questions, and bidding it strike out and swim or sink
'below the college passing mark. Professor Cunningham's "in-
troduction " is in strong contrast with this Jonah-like process. With
remarkable deliberation for so small a volume, in chapter after
chapter, he points out to the student the contours of the solid
shoreline of science and common fact, and how they reach down in
slope after slope to the sea of philosophy. Then he leads his charge
a little way into the water, showing him that the same earth is still
underfoot, but adding that the water is much deeper beyond in
places unplumbed. This course commends itself as more merciful
to the bewildered and perhaps shivery novice; but is it an intro-
duction to philosophy? Can one get a real acquaintance with
metaphysics or ethics more than a bowing one without actually
grappling with their problems? Is wading a mean proportional
between land travel and swimming?
The author begins with a plea for the genetic method. This
appears to be sound logically; but has he recognized the pedagogic
limitations of that method? A study of origins can be very dull
and pointless to those who have not yet acquired an interest in the
subject matter.
In the next five chapters a survey is made of what are called the
psychological, physiological and social "backgrounds to philosophy,"
which prove to be substantially the fields of social psychology and
anthropology. This course the author justifies on the ground that
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 273
"philosophy is one type of action, one method of meeting problems,
one way of responding to stimuli," and that a consideration, for
example, of the "psychological background" is essential, because:
" (a) It shows what are the springs, the sources of our action; (6) it
makes clear the point that these springs of action determine within
what limits our philosophical, scientific, social, and political prob-
lems must move; (c) it shows that all knowledge, even philosophy,
is for action." Unfortunately it is quite doubtful if the author's
summary description of the instincts and other human conations
will show the students these extensive principles.
As to the need for the physical background Dr. Cunningham
finds it illustrated in the fact that the Greek cosmography is "a
reflection of their environment" and the Eskimo hell is "cold and
dark" in strong contrast with the Jewish. "Buddhism," he
adds, "looks upon heaven as the cessation of all activity, and we
little wonder that this is so when we think of the incessant struggle
against the steaming heat and humidity of the Himalayan low-
lands."
So, likewise, does philosophy "reflect the social conditions from
which it has arisen and of which it is a part. " "In the same way
that we speak of eighteenth-century literature, dress, or modes of
travel, we may speak of eighteenth-century philosophy. ' ' This may
be a sound thesis, but the reader will have to take it mostly on
authority. It is not really developed argumentatively in the book,
nor is it even illustrated on any considerable scale. Political and
religious situations are referred to with more or less success to
account for certain philosophical systems the idealisms of Plato
and Berkeley, for example but the actual bearing, the conditioning
relations, of other social or anthropological phenomena on any
actual philosophical development is only remotely indicated. Surely
it is a far cry to connect Descartes 's "thinking substance" with
the Orphic religion and his "extended substance" with the Olymp-
ian element in Greece. Indeed, could it well be otherwise? Is it
feasible to establish such non-obvious relations in a small intro-
ductory book ? Does not the nature of the undertaking require that
the reader should be already acquainted with the phenomena the
philosophical conceptions to be accounted for? The extensive
backgrounds sketched as the conditioning environment of philoso-
phy are rather factors which have shaped more or less all culture
science, law, art, etc. as well as philosophy; and commonly their
influence in this field is much less evident, and probably less potent,
than in other directions of human interest. The author virtually
admits this when he quotes approvingly the remark of Seth that,
"national characteristics are never so strongly marked in science
274 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
and philosophy as in other branches of literature, and their in-
fluence takes longer in making itself felt," a principle which finds
illustration in the connection which the author makes "between the
empiricism and pragmatism of the English and their insular situ-
ation, with its premium upon individual enterprise and experience
perhaps his most successful attempt. The influence of the British
national situation is much more evident upon its commerce, in-
dustry, and politics, than upon its philosophy.
Professor Cunningham will have us believe that Plato, being
embittered by the Democracy's treatment of Socrates, "set about
consequently with the definite purpose of showing that individual-
ism and change are philosophically unsound." This may account
for Plato's course in Athenian politics; but can it be the full story
of the motives of that many-sided thinker a man whose ideas after
twenty-four centuries are still potent in politics, ethics, and theol-
ogy? Moreover, as one reads he wonders how much idea the new
student will get of Plato's actual teachings. Of the very few of
these that are referred to, the author tells him (quite properly) that
the Platonic Ideas are not thoughts but types the patterns ' ' after
which 'all particular things are made." The teleological position
and function of the Ideas is not mentioned; so that the student, so
far as he grasps the teaching at all, is likely to conceive of Platonic
idealism as a set of plans regarded as employed by a .divine architect,
rather than as a posited system of goals toward which all becoming
is striving, however imperfectly. Such a conception, of course,
leaves the perennial vitality of Platonism an enigma.
One's feeling of inadequacy is heightened when Berkeley's
idealism is accounted for entirely on religious grounds as the at-
tempt of a zealous defender of the faith and opponent of science
to overcome materialism by showing that all material objects (so-
called) are mental phenomena and therefore the creations of spirit,
which is the only substance. That this was a secondary interest of
Berkeley's is likely enough; but to find in it his main purpose is
to forget that he developed his system when he was a young man,
and long before he became a bishop. It is to overlook the fact that
theism did not in Berkeley's day cry out for a defender, the domi-
nant philosophies of Descartes and Locke being staunchly theistic;
and to overlook, also, a situation especially significant in this con-
nection, namely, that English materialists almost to a man were
theists. Even Hobbes argued for the existence of God, and called
himself a Christian. And again the question arises whether, in the
analysis of Berkeley's motives and methods, the student will feel
the force of that thinker's actual contention, and the seriousness,
intellectually speaking, of the problem of existences independent of
any knowing mind.
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 275
When the author comes to Kant and objective idealism even
political and religious conditioning agencies begin to yield to purely
intellectual ones, religion being but one of the four shaping in-
fluences discovered in Kantianism, the others being intellectual,
and the political and social situations of the time not being con-
sidered at all. (And, by the way, why should Kant, with his agnostic
emphases, be chosen as the representative of objective idealism.!
After his exploits in the field of pure reason can he be thought of as
admitting to the status of realities and objects of knowledge ideas
described as independent of the individual mind?)
The concluding three chapters of the book are devoted to the
influence of the theory of evolution on all departments of thought
of course, a purely intellectual conditioning factor.
It should be added that Professor Cunningham writes in a clear
and forcible style; that he gives many evidences of wide reading,
often makes apt characterizations, and withal commonly takes view-
points which appeal to readers of empirical and pragmatic leanings.
As he sees it, for example, one fundamental but double-faced ques-
tion arose out of the heterogeneity of the Greek population and the
changefulness of Greek political affairs. Externally it was the
query, "Is there anything permanent in the universe? Is there a
common principle that runs through all the differences that man
perceives?" The new political and social situation following the
Persian war, with its new individualistic outlook upon life, turned
to light the reverse, or internal, face of the question, namely. "Is
there a principle in man which is abiding and permanent, and
which is common to all men?" "Both questions arose necessarily
from the very conditions of Greek life." They are the same "but
directed toward a different subject matter" "one, the problem of
the outer world; the other, the problem of the inner world: one,
matter or nature; the other, mind or soul." The second of these,
with its inescapable homo mensura doctrine, becomes the tap-root
of the main divisions of modern philosophy. "Is man the measure
of truth? This raises the problem of logic and epistemology, or of
knowledge. Is man the measure of right and good? This, in turn,
raises the problem of politics and ethics. Is man the measure of
the beautiful? This is the problem of esthetics. Thus out of the
teachings of the sophists . . . came, in part, the first formulation of
the . . . fields within which discussions of a philosophic nature
would take place."
Another interesting example of the author's view-points is his
account of the animus of the Hellenistic ethical and religious schools.
In those stormy days the individual man, finding "the world had
got the better of him," sought "to get away from the world of the
276 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
object to the world of the subject." He had the belief that the
world within was his own, and that he could there find life abun-
dantly." Man, "when the situation gets the 'better of him," "quits
thinking and becomes a poet, romancer, or mystic. Man generally
becomes Orphic in his tendencies at the point of loss of control
over the facts of his social and political life." Plotinus, for ex-
ample, represents people who "have lost in the battles of life," and
who "fall, like the Oriental and the primitive man, before the
powers as a worshiper, rather than an investigator."
It is in his treatment of empiricism and evolutionism that Dr.
Cunningham shows the fullest appreciation, and makes the justest
comments, no doubt because the pragmatic interest and the interest
and the instrumental conception of knowledge are most congenial
to him. Like Locke, he "sees in philosophy a method of making a
better world. He believes that the idea of creation which we have
sketched here [the instrumentalists' idea] gives man a vote in the
affairs of the universe, . . . encourages him to attempt things 'un-
attempted yet in prose or rhyme,' inspires him to the creation of
'more stately mansions,' and to the forsaking of his 'low-vaulted
past.' He believes that the days of authority are over . . . and he
offers this dynamic universe as a challenge, ... a universe to be
won or lost at man's option, a universe not to fall down before and
worship . . . but a universe to be controlled, directed, and recreated
by man's intelligence."
One lays this suggestive book down with the feeling that the
author might well employ his learning and insight to better advan-
tage than that of searching out the influence of primitive man's
initiation ceremonies upon, say, the Critique of the Practical
Reason!
WILLIAM FORBES COOLEY.
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY.
JOURNALS AND NEW BOOKS
THE PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW, July, 1919. The Social
Significance of Education (pp. 345-369) : H. W. WmGHT.-The three
conceptions, language, invention and art, conceptions deduced from
a study of the content of perception in its early phase as revealed by
evolution, furnish appropriate ideas for an interpretation of the edu-
cational process. Education should aim at rational communication
(language), cooperative industry (invention) and emotional concord
(art). The Logic of Cosmology (pp. 370-378) : BENJAMIN IVES
OILMAN .-Expressed on one sentence: "Either there is no such thing
as soul, in which case, since gravitation stops when I 've gone by, the
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 277
All of things is not a Cosmos ; or there is nothing else than Soul ; in
which case the All of things is at once a Cosmos, and potentially tri-
partite." The Descriptive Method in Philosophy (pp. 379-390) : D.
T. HOWARD.-A criticism of the pragmatic theory of knowledge as
set forth by Dewey. Concludes that the descriptive method is not
an exact account of "immediate experience," is not as definite as it
is claimed to be, and is untenable in the light of all of the facts of
experience. The Function of Intuition in Descartes' Philosophy of
Science (pp. 391-^409) : JAMES L. MuRSELL.-Descartes' interest was
not metaphysical, as has been traditionally held, but scientific. His
doctrine of intuition is not metaphysical, but arose in connection
with scientific methodology. Intuition as a scientific instrument of
method originates the epistemological inquiry as to objectivity and
externality. Reviews of Books: Edward Gleason Spaulding, The
New Rationalism: The Development of a Constructive Realism upon
the Basis of Modern Logic and Science, and through the Criticism
of Opposed Philosophical Systems, EDWARD L. SCHAUB. Bernard
Bosanquet, Some Suggestions in Ethics, A. S. FERGUSON. Benedetto
Croce, Teoria e storia delta Storiografia, ALDAN H. GILBERT. Notices
of New Books. Summaries of Articles. Notes.
THE PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW, September, 1919. Philoso-
phy in France, 1918 (pp. 443-465) : ANDRE LALANDE-Contains a
summary of the chief philosophical and psychological writings of the
year. Notes the death of two striking figures, Jules Lachelier and
Gaston Milhaud. Platonic Pluralism in Esthetics (pp. 466^478) :
HELEN Huss PARKHURST.-Starting from the position that human
beings are temperamentally different, the writes states, critically ex-
amines and rejects the theory of art attributed to a comment made
by Flaubert that ' ' for every idea, every inward vision of the beauti-
ful, there is but one name, one perfect epithet, the task of the artist
being the quest of this unique word." On Nietzsche's Doctrine of
the Will to Power (pp. 479^190) : G. WATTS CuNNiNGHAM.-Enquires
whether Nietzsche 's doctrine of the Will to Power, the basic doctrine
of his philosophy of life, can logically support the individualism built
upon it. Concludes that it can not. Believes that "in principle,
the Christian ideal of the 'brotherhood of man' ... is more nearly
consistent with the doctrine of the Will to Power ' ' than the ideas set
up by Nietzsche. Manichcean Tendencies in the History of Philoso-
phy, (pp. 491-510) : HENRY NsuMANN.-Designating as Manichaean,
" (1) the belief that there are two distinct principles, good and evil,
in active conflict, (2) the assumption that the good principle is lim-
ited in power, (3) the prominence given to the struggle against evil
278 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
in human life as related to the cosmic conflict," traces the expression
of such views in the history of thought from the earliest times to the
present. Reviews of Books: George Plimpton Adams, Idealism and
the Modern Age, J. E. CREIGHTON. Wilmon Henry Sheldon, Strife
of Systems and Productive Duality, GEORGE P. ADAMS. Henry Fair-
field Osborn, The Origin and Evolution of Life, J. E. BOODIN. Wil-
liam Ralph Inge, The Philosophy of Plotinus, KENNETH SYLVAN
GUTHRIE. Summaries of Articles. Notes.
PSYCHOLOGICAL BULLETIN, September, 1919. Child and
Educational Psychology Number, edited by B. T. Baldwin. General
Reviews and Summaries: Child Psychology (pp. 299-315) : D.
MITCHELL. - Sixty-four references, all in English are reviewed. Edu-
cational Psychology (pp. 315-335) : C. TRUMAN GRAY. -One hundred
and eighty-seven references are mentioned. Interest in educational
tests continues. There is a rapidly growing interest in general intelli-
gence tests as a basis for educational procedure. Considerable atten-
tion is being paid to educational diagnosis and prognosis. The ref-
erences are grouped according to (1) text books, (2) monographs,
(3) various forms of mental activity, (4) certain educational prob-
lems, (5) elementary and high school subjects. Special Reviews:
Lewis M. Terman, The Intelligence of School Children: LOUISA
WAGONER. R. R. Rusk, Experimental Education: H. J. PETERSON.
Blood, Benjamin Paul. Pluriverse: An Essay in the Philosophy of
Pluralism. (With an introduction by Horace Meyer Kallen.)
Boston : Marshall Jones Co. 1920. Pp. xliv -f 263. $2.50.
Dunlap, Knight. Personal Beauty and Racial Betterment. St.
Louis: C. V. Mosby Co. 1920. Pp. 95. $1.00.
Evans, Elida. The Problem of the Nervous Child. (With an in-
troduction by C. G. Jung.) New York : Dodd, Mead & Co. 1920.
Pp. viii -f 299. $2.50.
Hasse, Heinrich. Das Problem der Giiltigkeit in der Philosophic
David Humes: Ein kritischer Beitrag zur Geschichte der Er-
kenntnistheorie. Miinchen : Ernst Reinhardt. Pp. 192. M. 14.30.
Vaughan, Victor C. Sex Attraction. St. Louis: C. V. Mosby Co.
1920. Pp. 44. $.50.
NOTES AND NEWS
WE acknowledge the receipt of the first issue of a new quarterly
journal of philosophy, theology and literature, entitled The Per-
sonalist. It is edited by Professor Ralph Tyler Flewelling, of the
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 279
Department of Philosophy of the University of Southern California,
and is published by the University at Los Angeles. Judging from
the initial number of this quarterly, it would appear that it is de-
voted to the promotion of that particular philosophical attitude
which Professor Borden Parker Bowne represented. Under the
title "To the Gentle Personalist" the editor makes the following
appeal :
"In his last public address Dr. Bowne said something about his
work being done. To the students whom he had taught to bend the
bow and aim the shaft he left the remaining task.
"Since those words were spoken ten years have passed. With
the passage of years the significance of his thought has grown upon
us as the proportions of a mountain clear themselves with distance.
The effect of those teachings, however, can be perpetuated only as
they enter into the living thought of to-day through living channels.
On this task many men have been working disconnectedly and frag-
in entarily. It is now time to furnish a focus for the perpetuation of
that wisdom which has meant so much to us. Bowne would have
been the last of all of us to wish the slavish perpetuation of his
teaching or interpretations for he was no literalist, believing rather
in the inspiration which giveth life. Is not the personalistic inter-
pretation of life worth magnifying? Will you do your share by
subscription, voice and pen ? The line of action is clear.
"'To other Personalists it may seem worth while to perpetuate
the theistic and personalistic type of philosophy. So far as we know
this is the first undisguised attempt in this form to provide a nucleus
for such thinking. Will you share with us the labors and responsi-
bilities? Doubtless others could have done it better, but someone
must needs start."
Another new quarterly of theology and philosophy is Gregori-
anum, which made its first appearance in January of this year. It
is published by the professors of the Pontificia Universita Gregoriana
at Rome, with the collaboration of certain professors of the Com-
pagnia di Gesu. Like the Revista di Filosofia Neo-Scolastica,, it is
devoted to scholastic philosophy, but it will differ from the older
review in emphasizing speculative and critical subjects, rather than
scholarship and research.
ARRANGEMENTS are already under way for the next annual meet-
ing of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Associa-
tion. At the invitation of the President and Department of Phi-
losophy of Columbia University the meeting will be held in New
York from December 28 to 30, 1920. It is hoped that the central
280 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
location will make possible an unusually large attendance. The
subject for discussion which was chosen at the last meeting of the
Association was "The aims and methods of teaching philosophy."
The Executive Committee feels that the Association in choosing this
topic did not wish a discussion on the contents of courses or methods
of conducting class exercises, but rather a consideration of the
broader field of the relation of philosophy to college education and
the whole life of the nation. It accordingly proposes that the topic
be restated as: "The role of the philosopher in modern life, with
reference both to teaching and to research."
A MEETING of the Aristotelian Society was held in London on
March 22, 1920, with Professor Wildon Carr in the chair. Mr.
Clement C. J. Webb read a paper on, "Obligation, Autonomy, and
the Common Good." He contended that the notion of obligation,
in which Kant rightly found the essential feature of our moral
consciousness, can not be directly derived (as Green seems to sup-
pose) from the notion of a "common good"; that on the contrary
the notion of a "common good," as also the closely connected notion
of a. "general will," derives its significance for ethics, and eventually
for politics also, from its connection with the notion of obligation:
and that this makes it necessary for any truly ethical conception of
the state to retain the idea of "authority," as ascertained indeed
through the general will, because only thus can it be recognized as
authority viz. the community for itself; not however as in itself
merely the result of the general will, 'but as the expression of an
absolute factor therein, which perhaps may be best described as the
sovereignty of God. To the thought expressed in Kant's choice of
the word "autonomy" to express the status of the good will may be
traced along one line of descent the anti-authoritarian tendency in
contemporary ethics and politics.
AN international meeting of British and French philosophical
societies will be held at Oxford, England, September 24 to 27, 1920.
An invitation has also been extended to the American Philosophical
Association and it is hoped that some representation from both the
Eastern and Western Branches of this body can be arranged, al-
though the date of the meeting precludes a very large attendance
of American philosophers.
DR. ALBERT G. A. BALZ, of the University of Virginia, has been
promoted from associate professor to professor of philosophy.
VOL. XVII, No. 11. MAY 20, 1920
THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS
THE PROBLEM OF PHILOSOPHY
ANY man who is more than ordinarily reflective is likely to ba
called a philosopher. If he is to give distinction to the appel-
lation, whatever special abilities he may manifest, he will have the
capacity to relate the experiences of his life and of the lives of others
to principles, for him, at least, fundamental. Where these principles
come from is not always evident. They may be adaptations of the
dogmas of religion; they may be personal interpretations of the
basic laws 1 of science ; or they may be intuitions that arise somehow
in the course of observation and study. In any case they are there
and require attention. For one who is interested in human behavior,
there is perhaps nothing that is as important to know with respect
to an individual or a social group as the set of fundamental prin-
ciples from which its thinking starts and to which it returns; the
basis of its judgments in politics, art, morality and religion. With-
out such knowledge the conduct of any of the larger enterprises of
life can not be understood, and without deference to such knowledge
conviction can never be produced on any matter of importance.
Facts may be important, but the background to which they are assim-
ilated is equally so.
A good background is not easy to attain. Sets of principles have
a most pernicious trick of failing to be consistent, of requiring elab-
oration or supplementation, and above all of demanding substantia-
tion. The game of playing with them may become very fascinating.
The result is that many a young philosopher loses himself in the
game and, starting from a very meager basis of experience and
knowledge, expends his whole energy in trying to get his materials,
however scant they may be, into shape. His contact with life may
be slight, and if he ever succeeds in getting back to the world men
live in, the facts of life show him infinite puzzles. To be sure, he-
brings with him a system, the product of intense mental labor. But
he also brings narrowed vision. Not only does he fail to understand
what does not fall within his scheme but he actually does not see the
rest of life. Vision is not the mere act of looking but involves prepa-
281
282 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
ration, as 'every one knows Who has looked through a telescope, a
microscope, or been present at a dissection in a biological laboratory.
Such a philosopher will see nothing that does not fall within his
scheme of things and deny whatever threatens to wreck it. Like the
spider, he may continue to spin his web but the materials are drawn
from his own entrails, and the result is likely to concern no one but
himself, unless some unwary fly is lured into the mesh. It is almost
impossible to give up a system when attained, the labor of attain-
ment has been so great, and construction goes on for the fun of
creation. Hence there are voices that cry, philosophy must not be
a system.
But it is hasty to conclude that philosophic systems are unde-
sirable or that philosophizing is a narrowing activity. If a philoso-
phy is something to live by, and living requires coherent purposive
direction, it is implicit that philosophy must be systematic. It is a
limitation, but only in the sense that all organization of ideas or
materials is limitation. The humanitarian is limited in that he can
not be a crook, and the paper mill in that it can not turn out sub-
marines. This sort of limitation is the essential condition of achieve-
ment. But a system need not become rigid and incapable of growth
or improvement. Like other works of man a philosophy can live
only amongst those who want it to live. Changes in scientific knowl-
edge, social conditions, or human aspirations will render it obsolete
unless it contains within itself some principle making it capable of
adaptation to them. In general, the more rigid the system, unless
its factual basis is exceptionally rich and fortunately chosen, the
narrower the circle of those to whom it will appeal and the shorter
its productive life.
The anti-metaphysical philosophers have felt the force of these
objections and exaggerated them into a wholesale protest against
metaphysics, or the systems of fundamental principles. They have
striven to safeguard themselves, not by avoiding principles, but by
adopting them from the sciences. Their selection, however, is often
rather casual and the result is a philosophical fragment. Sometimes,
despite themselves, their materials crystallize into a system of which
the only claim to be anti-metaphysical is that it is opposed to some
other system with which they have taken issue. It is best, then, to
acknowledge the fundamental human need for a systematic integra-
tion of ideas but at the same time to realize that the order of discov-
ery is not the order of exposition, that principles can not be grasped
a priori to the facts that they must interpret. In other words, the
best situation is one in which the background for our judgments re-
mains somewhat plastic while the details of its implications are being
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 283
worked out and tested by life. For the thinker, his metaphysics can
not be first established and then his programme of life unfolded, but
the two grow together into an integrated coherent whole. His phi-
losophy is then inductively and not deductively established. Though
it may lose thereby in archetonic perfection, there is more than ade-
quate compensation in its consequent vitality. The idea of system
may be always present though the actual system lacks the finality
of an absolutism.
To many men the above remarks will sound rather silly. They
will say, a philosopher is after the truth and if he can attain it there
will be no more talk of system or not system ; there will be no more
philosophic disagreements, but a philosophy everlasting. It is not a
choice but a necessity that lies before us. Of course, they will add,
from the very nature of the materials, philosophic truth is very diffi-
cult to obtain. It may have to wait upon the perfection of the
sciences and philosophy can not look forward to the Utopian state in
an immediate future. The history of philosophy is a long record of
errors but and this is the egoism of every new generation we are
at last on the right track and shall end nearer the goal than our
forebears.
Others will object on the grounds that the present day is replete
with diverse philosophies. They read the situation as hopeless. If
philosophy can not find the truth, is it not 'better to give up specu-
lating and content ourselves with the tasks of daily life? When the
true answer remains forever hidden why ask of the whence and the
whither? Philosophy to be worth while must have the truth, but
since it can not get it, it is better to leave it and its problems entirely
alone. If a man must have some guide to avoid accepting life with
stultified intelligence on the level of the vigorous play of the lowest
and most animal impulses of human nature, there are always the
religious mystics. Here, though the disciple may remain in igno-
rance, his cravings may be in part satisfied by a conviction that to the
elite of the sect ail things have been made clear. We are so used to
the authority of experts, our doctors, our lawyers, our mechanicians,
that it is easy to feel that we can hire our philosopher or our clergy-
man to put us straight also. Where the truth can not be found, at
least by the layman, to affiliate with a prosperous sect seems an easy
refuge. If its master knows it all, all is well.
Both of these objections rest upon a misapprehension of the real
nature and mission of philosophy. The latter fails to note that phi-
losophy is a sort of mental hygiene. To leave it in the hands of a
philosopher is like rejoicing in the strength of a Sandow while we
ourselves waste away of inactivity, or vaunting our cleanliness be-
284 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
cause our doctor takes daily baths. An attitude toward life is not a
thing that can be borrowed from some one else, but must be indi-
vidually achieved by integrating impulses and desires with knowl-
edge of fact into a consistent programme of action. It is essentially
an acquisition of healthy-mindedness, and most men are afflicted with
the ailment for which philosophizing is the remedy. Philosophizing
is a personal need and, like proper exercise, is an individual matter
dependent upon mode of life, environmental conditions and inner
state. The man who has not a philosophy 'lacks a coherent character
and through mental conflicts is wasting in futile frictions those ener-
gies that ought to be expended in full freedom of living. The phi-
losopher by occupation, like the physician, can not effect a cure by
the extent of his own knowledge, but only by what he can stimulate
his patient to do for himself. As a man may become well by his
reaction to those things with which a skilful physician brings him in
contact, so he may be aided to find himself through reacting to the
reflections of a philosopher.
It is nevertheless true that there are right and wrong ways to
philosophize. The universe is not perfectly fluid but confronts us
with facts that have to be taken into consideration. Human nature
also, although it may present wide diversities, has its limitations.
No philosophy can be wholly sound that substitutes either dreams or
illusions for these facts. There is no healthy-mindedness in the
dreams of the Lotus Eaters, and no intrinsic value in fool's gold.
But it does not follow that there is a single authoritative philosophy
which this or any other age can discover that will be authoritative
for all time. Philosophy is too close to life to admit of such schemati-
zation. Let us suppose that science has realized its ideal and that
every phenomenon, psychological, sociological, and physical, can be
subsumed under its specific laws. It would follow that every situa-
tion, with or without human participation in it, could be understood.
The causes that brought it about and the consequences that must
spring from it could be 'grasped. In particular instances we could
foretell whether individual men would seek or avoid these antici-
pated consequences. We should know what ideals they held and
how they came to hold them. But we should also know that they
would not hold the same ideals or seek and avoid the same things.
They would have different philosophies. Only if by some system of
super-eugenics and super-education all human organisms could be-
come exactly alike and be placed in identical environments would
the same reactions take place and a single philosophy hold. Nature
nowhere exhibits such identities of complex forms, and there is no
ground for believing that men will ever seek such unanimity, even
if they should come to have sufficient knowledge to attain it.
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 285
But even here our principle of the limitation of possible varia-
tions holds. To assert that there is no possible absolute and uni-
versal philosophy is not to assert that every variant of the philosophic
form is a good thing. Variation within species seems to be the neces-
sary condition of biological evolution, but some variations are mon-
sters and accomplish nothing. So with philosophies. Those that
arise from knowledge of facts have a claim to respectful hearing and
their variety may be a healthful stimulus productive of new ideas.
But those built on fictions and confusions take from man his capacity
for the intelligent conduct of life, a capacity the extent of which is
his one claim to be considered as distinct from the brutes.
Herein lies a fundamental difference, too little understood, be-
tween science and philosophy. Philosophy starts from the truths
with which science ends, but its purpose is not merely to cite or to
systematize. Scientific truths are instruments which transfer the
control of our action from present facts to anticipated consequences
of action. The perspective which philosophy introduces should serve
to integrate these responses into a coherent life, a condition perhaps
best described as healthy-mindedness. For science the fundamental
category is description, and its measure of success the accuracy and
extent of the predictions it makes possible. Where the scientist
seeks discoveries, the philosopher makes interpretations. The for-
mer aims to make the control of nature possible and the latter to
point out desirable directions in which this capacity to control may
be directed. Philosophy can not exist without science, and science
loses its significance without philosophy. In the strict sense, then,
there are no philosophic truths, but only scientific truths. When
these are utilized- to suggest or clarify a reasonable and desirable
mode of directing human life they constitute a philosophy. If phi-
losophy is called true, the meaning of truth undergoes a transforma-
tion. While scientific truth is tested by verified predictions, phi-
losophic truths stand or fall with the presence or absence of satisfac-
tion resulting from a life lived in harmony with them.
It is worth while to note the procedure of science a little more
concretely. We have said that the fundamental category of science
is description, but all description is not science. Scientific descrip-
tion involves selection. If an intelligible world is to arise from the
"blooming, buzzing confusion" of infantile experience, it must be
that some buzzes can be singled out from the rest, identified, and
named. If the selection is made in the proper way for scientific pur-
poses experience demonstrates that the character and occurrence of
other buzzes can be predicted from them. It is not sufficient that
science shall discriminate objects but it must make its discrimina-
286 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
tions in such a way that they can serve as a 'basis for predictions.
We grasp our world by samples, but samples are worthless unless
indicative of the character of that from which they are drawn. It is
not mere facts but significant facts that must be formulated descrip-
tively as a basis of science.
The possibility of science lies objectively in a certain character of
reality that makes it possible to analyze the world into entities that
may be treated as discrete. Nevertheless all talk about their ulti-
mate independence is an abstract fiction, since they are never found
except in conditions of interdependence with the rest of reality. We
conceive reality as some sort of a complexly differentiated whole, but
as no one has as yet been able to draw any momentous synthetic con-
clusion about this whole, it remains for thought a totality rather than
an unity, and pluralistic philosophies present the best empirical cre-
dentials.
From the study of the parts of complex objects, such as the bark,
wood, sap, leaves and branches of a tree, we are able to draw syn-
thetic conclusions as to the fundamental character and results of
the tree's growth; we are tempted to apply the same type of pro-
cedure to a synthetic conception of the universe. Some have even
gone so far as to make such statements the fundamental aim of phi-
losophy. But, if the task were possible, it would still fall within the
province of science, and at present our analysis is far too incomplete
and our detailed studies far too meager to hope for success. We
should have as materials only somewhat vague and general indica-
tions from the astronomer, geologist and biologist, too incomplete to
enable a conception of the universe to take a place in any way com-
parable with that of the growth of a tree. The nearest approach to
such an idea is expressed by evolution, but evolution, strictly under-
stood, means nothing more than descent tracing and is but a way of
confirming the same sort of unity of the whole through time that the
interdependence of contemporaneous entities gives for space, that is,
the possibility of studying a cross-section of reality in another dimen-
sion.
Because man has achieved a measure of success in science and is
able to make predictions with some degree of accuracy, he has an
instrument by which he can maintain a certain degree of mastery
over his future. Futures that he does not like he often forefends by
introducing or removing factors of the situation which science shows
will result in them. Desired anticipations are often obtained by
producing the conditions from which they will arise. But, be it
noted, science never says what he must seek or avoid. The scientific
function has been fulfilled when the capacity to predict results has
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 287
been attained. Strictly speaking, there is no reason why a child
should not eat a gallon of ice cream at a sitting or a man leap from
a thousand-foot cliff. Science can merely say to the child, you will
be ill ; and to the man, you will die. If the child replies, Why should
I not be sick ? or the man, Why should I not die ? science can only go
on to state the further consequences and conditions of sickness and
death. It is safe to predict that in these instances an avoiding re-
sponse would be immediately given to these consequences, if they are
understood, but that statement itself is merely a prediction based on
observations of human behavior.
There remains, then, an important class of questions that science
does not directly answer. Desires are the mainsprings of human
action and these questions concern the integration of these desires
into a coherent group that can furnish a background for healthy and
effective living. It is necessary first to penetrate beneath the more
obvious desires. These are usually enumerated in terms of immedi-
ate satisfactions such as health, economic independence, or more
generally, happiness. Philosophies have been built upon them, but
such philosophies are peculiarly unsatisfying. It is an interesting
and by no means easy task to find out what it is that men actually
desire, for ends are not as simple as the language in which we -express
them. Thus the pleasures and luxury of wealth may inspire the
imagination, but its attainment may carry with it care, worry, ill
health, separation from old friends, and a hundred subsidiary condi-
tions that in unhappiness more than offset positive gains. Above all,
in attaining ends, human nature may become so transformed that
the end is by no means the all-sufficient satisfier that it appeared to
be at the start. But these things will vary with individual cases.
The very phrase "what men desire" is itself a confusing generality,
for there is no one thing that all men are bound to desire from their
nature as men, and the many desires of an individual man can hardly
be summed up under the simple phrase "a man's desire."
The comprehensive problem of philosophy is to find integrations
of these many individual human impulses that shall be compatible
with the facts of reality that are beyond our control. Such integra-
tions express themselves as ideals. The entire structure is founded
on science, for we can not tell what may be unless we have scientific
understanding of what it is. A sufficiently developed science can
tell us what ideals are practicable and can elaborate the results of
their realization. Jt may even foresee how individual men will react
to alternative ideals, to seek or avoid them. It is essential for a
philosopher to choose and to justify his choice. Science may study
him and his choice, but the choosing is not a part of science. In
288 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
other words, while the fundamental category of science is descrip-
tion, the fundamental category of philosophy is action. Scientific
results are authoritative and final truths, where science has been suc-
cessful. They make possible verifiable predictions. Philosophic re-
sults are inspirational and win approvals. But neither can stand
without the other, for while, in the last analysis, philosophically es-
tablished ideals are the ultimate justifications for the directions in
which the labor of scientific research is expended, science is the cor-
nerstone upon which philosophy must build if its ideals are to have
rational appeal, that is, if they are not to lead merely to disillusion-
ment.
The first problem for any philosophy is a careful consideration
of the structure and nature of the world we live in and of our rela-
tion to that world. "While there is a certain plasticity about human
nature and the physical world, of which we take advantage in adapt-
ing environment to our needs and ourselves to inevitable environ-
ments, that plasticity is not without its limitations. To neglect these
limitations is to indulge in mere Utopian speculation. The founda-
tions of philosophy are those established principles of science which
tell us most about the potentialities of the world and of man. Real-
istic and empirical philosophies accept them, idealistic philosophies
seek to transcend them, and mystical philosophies deny their validity.
As a result mysticisms have had to take refuge in vague faculties of
intuition, the very existence of which, in the mystic's sense, is in
question, and ontological idealism has never demonstrated the possi-
bilities of transcendence. At best, the result is a sort of poetry to
be valued from its emotional appeal only. To the man who would
know where he is going, the empirical and realistic type of procedure
is the only one our present knowledge can justify.
The orientation of a philosopher with respect to scientific prin-
ciples is what really constitutes his metaphysics. He can make no
factual discoveries that science has not made. He can not criticize,
correct or transform knowledge that has been worked out in close
relation to data and has meaning only in so far as it furnishes a
verifiable interpretation of that data. He differs from the student
of applied science in that while the latter is seeking immediate appli-
cations of scientific principles to the production of specific things or
conditions that are desired, the former seeks light as to the general
conditions under which greater congeniality or mutual fitness can
be attained in human relations and the relations of man to his en-
vironment. While the philosopher might seek to sanction crafts-
manship as the ideal of productivity, or economic gain as the basis of
industrialism, the applied scientist seeks the means of attaining the
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 289
accepted end but not the sanctions that justify that end. Both util-
ize scientific discoveries, the one to exhibit an end as possible and
desirable, the other to perfect the means for attaining it.
While philosophy consists in the act of accepting ends, its intel-
lectual elaboration lies in the construction and evaluation of these
ends. Consider its various branches as examples. If we enter the
field of logic, the first question that confronts the philosopher is what
should we seek to do with our capacity for thinking. The blanket
answer, arrive at knowledge of the truth, requires definition. We
must understand the nature of thinking and the ends it is possible
for it to attain. This knowledge is scientific. We learn that think-
ing is not an invented process, but a name given to certain moments
selected from the whole process of response. The selection may vary
according to the ends sought. Thus processes used to reinforce an
emotional satisfaction such as may be obtained from a religious belief
may be called thinking. This involves concentration on facts of a
certain sort and the concatenation of them in a particular way.
The history of philosophy from the early Christian era is replete
with such eiforts. As they have a specific aim, they require a special
ordering of mental process, and the result is a philosophic technique
that attained its highest perfection in scholastic logic. The mental
functions that are here integrated and designated as thinking are a
special selection that determines its own method and definition of
truth.
The Greeks had little power to reconstruct nature, hence felt the
need to accept things as they are. As a result nature for them was
resolved into essences and their logic was one of categories and of
deduction. The striving for truth became the effort to separate
things by kinds and develop relations of genus and species. But the
modern man is inspired by a heightened consciousness of his capacity
to master nature, and perhaps himself. He feels himself captain of
his soul and master of his world. Consequently, for him those men-
tal processes constitute the essence of thinking that make for in-
creased success in prediction. He extends his mind by laboratories
and apparatus, thus attaining a new logic and new conception of
truth.
The question as to which logic is correct can not be categorically
answered, for the question itself is obscure. Each is successful in
its own field. Passive acceptance of what is, and resignation to con-
templation, is generally repulsive to our contemporaries. Nor do
they care to wait for the will of God to realize itself in the world or
to cultivate the aloofness of the hermit. To them life is an adven-
ture and one for which the responsibility must rest on their own
290 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
shoulders. Their logic is accordingly the logic of foresight, and
philosophy easily takes the form of an experimentalism. What is
needed is that experiments should have intelligent direction. There
is a wide difference between those who experiment for mere experi-
ment's sake, the vagabond adventurers of life, and those reflective
enough to utilize experimentation constructively. This change, how-
ever, merely indicates a shifting of interest and of ideals, but in no
way demonstrates an inadequacy of other types of logic for the ends
for which they were formulated.
The first act of a philosopher, then, in considering the fields of
art, morality or religion is to determine the ends which he demands
that these achievements severally fulfil. Since the end must be pos-
sible, it can only be formulated on the basis of scientific knowledge
as to rational expectation; and since the end must be desirable, it
must be formulated with respect to the actualities and potentialities
of human nature. These also must be learned by science. But the
fiat is not learned but given as a reaction to an anticipation, and
since human nature is diverse, the fiat will not always be the same.
The conceptions that bring about the greatest integrations of per-
sonality and adjustment to the world, for men in one stage of devel-
opment and under certain environmental conditions, will be wholly
inadequate in another stage and under different conditions. Hence
philosophies will continually arise and pass away. They are not
necessarily demonstrated false but become unfruitful and so uninter-
esting. The occurrence of technical mistakes in great philosophic
systems are insignificant factors in destroying them as compared
with new social or environmental conditions such as are encompassed
by migration, political revolution, military conquest and scientific
discovery.
The history of philosophy has, in consequence of the nature of
philosophy, a very different value from the history of science. Scien-
tific principles are either correct, in which case they are incorporated
in contemporary science, or incorrect, in which case they are left
behind as mistakes. The mistakes in science may be instructive from
the point of view of the study of method but they have little general
interest, though the kind of problems which scientists have set before
themselves are interesting as revealing diverse interests by which
men have been inspired. Philosophies, on the other hand, are noth-
ing but revelations of human ideals, and are always in so far con-
temporary, for although the type of aspirations held by the majority
of men in any age may change, almost every type is usually present.
We have our Greeks and our Scholastics today. Indeed, in many
respects, Plato and Aristotle are the most "modern" of all philoso-
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 291
phers, certainly more modern than men of the seventeenth century
and far more so than the men of the thirteenth. The most striking
difference lies in the background of the knowledge against which
these great Greeks set forth their ideas, that is, in the materials
through which the intellectual elaboration of their philosophies was
worked out, not in the form of ideality which is the real essense of
their philosophies.
Philosophies, from this point of view, fall into three parts: the
first, in which the factual foundations are set forth and in which the
rest is more or less implicit ; the second, in which the ideal construc-
tion is developed and demonstrated as rational; the third, in which
the programme for the realization of the desired order of life is laid
down. This third part, however, is often left by the philosopher for
others to supply. These parts constitute a metaphysics, a practical
philosophy, and an applied philosophy. Each has its peculiar
difficulties and problems.
The factual foundations of a philosophy are derived from an
examination of the results of scientific investigations. The sciences
analyze nature and man in terms of identifiable characteristics and
systems of relations such that consequences of various collections of
factors can be foreseen. But no one science is sufficient for philoso-
phy. Sciences are originally differentiated merely as points of con-
tact with the world from which investigations have started and from
which they have often, as yet, not progressed very far. As they
grow they tend to run together. When physics and chemistry de-
velop, physical chemistry arises as a common field, and today the
biologist, the physicist, the chemist, the geologist, and even the as-
tronomer have many common problems. The logical result should
be a single body of knowledge wherein the philosopher might find in
the interweavings a sort of cosmic map on which his fundamental
conceptions could receive orientation.
The necessary appeal to scientific principles as 1 the background
of thinking is the basis of the claim of some philosophers that their
work is a critique of scientific principles, that philosophy is the
science of sciences, or more poetically, that philosophy is the queen
of the sciences. When a particular time has been dazzled by achieve-
ments in a single field, as Leibniz's was by mathematical physics,
Diderot's by physiology, Bergson's by evolutionary biology, there is
danger of a preponderant influence from the field' in question.
Sound metaphysics must beware of such influences and keep each
within its proper perspective, however many new developments and
suggestions the specific development in question may call forth.
The introduction of perspective into the collocation of scientific
292 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
results may create the impression that philosophy has introduced
something new into science. This is an illusion, however, for the
factual bearings of scientific discoveries must not become changed.
There is no way of getting information from concepts when they
are cut loose from the facts they were formulated to interpret. Phi-
losophy can merely suggest ranges of facts to be examined and em-
phasize aspects of them essential to its purpose. The attempt to
abstract concepts from their factual context involves us in the futili-
ties of such dialectic as Herbert Spencer utilized to demonstrate the
unknowable. His exposition of contradictions involved in the con-
cepts of space, time, matter, motion, etc., does not show that there is
no reality for such concepts to represent, but rather that the form of
development these concepts have undergone for scientific purposes
is not adequate for the use he makes of them. A return to the basic
facts makes his criticisms meaningless. A conception adequate for
certain scientific purposes may not 'be adequate for others.
But, of course, the same man may be both scientist and philoso-
pher. If versed in the methods and experienced in the facts of a
science, he may make genuine scientific discoveries, but these are not
philosophic discoveries, and they must also be distinguished from
the pseudo-scientific discoveries some philosophers have put forward
as the result of conceptual analysis and dialectic, discoveries that
usually fall before the first attempt to give them empirical verifica-
tion. Perhaps no less dangerous, in his own field, is the scientist's
tendency to lapse into crude philosophizing. Where the philosopher
may err by detaching scientific concepts from the facts that are their
justification, the scientist may as easily fall into a justification of
concepts by hastily accepted philosophic notions. No more flagrant
example than the biologist's use of teleology need be cited.
When one has in mind a scientific interpretation of nature and
man in their relations to each other the way for the second part of
philosophy is prepared. If the foundation has been successfully
elaborated there is disclosed a range of potentialities for man in the
world he lives in. All these can not be realized, for conflicting lines
of development are possible. Certain choices must be made and
these choices react on each other so that a nice adjustment is neces-
sary if the result is to be a true mental hygiene and fit the philoso-
pher to face life with greatest courage and vigor.
In ithe first place there must be formulated some conception of
the relation of man to the cosmos and the function he has to fulfil as
man. The decision arrived at on this point fixes the type of religious
thought that can be accepted, not the form of a dogmatic religion,
though the conclusions may be such that such a religion is coherent
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 293
with them. It holds the philosopher within the bounds of deism,
theism, pantheism, or even atheism, if the result is an apotheosis of
universal and necessary law.
When this part of a philosophy is complete, the philosopher's
general attitude toward life, the type of things he stands for, be-
comes clear. If he is not to become a mere Utopian, that is, if his
metaphysics has not gotten away from realities, the result should
appear as something that it is reasonable for a human being to desire.
Fortunately there are groups of men sufficiently alike and in suffi-
ciently similar environments, so that the result will rarely, if ever, be
a purely individual achievement. Other men will at least find satis-
faction in the same general type of thinking and may constitute a
school, though they are never in perfect agreement. At least the
types of logic striven for, the conceptions of the good approved, and
the ideals of beauty valued will be closely congruous. The status
of the second part of a philosophy is always determined by the first
part, even though it be through the decision that logic, ethics, and
esthetics must be developed on an independent empirical or rational
basis, for this decision is itself a part of the metaphysics. In most
cases, one may suspect, some moral or religious problem comes first
into the philosopher's mind and the first part of his philosophy is
developed to clear up problems so forced upon him. The order of
exposition may reverse the order of investigation.
This part of philosophy is always idealistic in that it consists in
the elaboration and critique of ideals. But it is not a part of the
metaphysical idealism of history, for it does not require the effort
to show that reality involves ideal strivings in its inner nature. Its
ideals are rather practical plans developed on a basis of fact and
pointing some condition to be realized that the philosopher, at least,
considers desirable. They are not then contrasted with the real as
something inherently impossible to attain. Just as the expression,
' ' It is all right in theory but does not work in practise, ' ' is absurd
because the failure to work means that facts have been misrepre-
sented, overlooked, or contradictorily interpreted, and the theory is
not all right; so the inherently unattainable ideal implies a similar
abuse of data and is at best an emotionally satisfying picture. An
ideal, however, may be of extreme difficulty to attain, may require
a considerable number of preliminary tasks to be accomplished, and
may represent an achievement beyond the attainment of one lifetime.
In such a case it has value because it dictates the tasks to be accom-
plished now and gives direction to what might otherwise be a pur-
poseless scattering of endeavor. In this sense only the practically
unattainable may be accounted a rational goal.
294 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
But in denning this part of philosophy as ideal construction, it
is not implied that the result must be finalistic. It may easily be an
integral part of a metaphysics, based on a study of the natures of
men, that the chief value in the attainment of any aim is to make
possible revaluations and a new advance toward further attainments
the character of which can not even be imagined until the conse-
quences of taking the first steps are realized. Such philosophies are
irreconcilably opposed to absolutisms and finalisms. They are genu-
inely " philosophies with the lids off."
The third part of philosophy is the formulation of a practical
plan for the realization of ideals proposed by the speculative con-
structions of the second part. It is realized most concretely in sys-
tems of logic and of "practical" ethics. In connection with social
philosophy, and perhaps esthetics, the demand for extensive and de-
tailed information of particular sorts is often a stumbling-block to
the philosopher himself if he attempts to work out this phase of his
system with completeness and exactitude. All social reforms, how-
ever, are somebody's plan for realizing a condition set forth as de-
sirable by a philosophy, and political reconstructions are similar
plans. As a consequence of this cooperative authorship, they are
frequently to be justified only by an eclectic advocacy of several phi-
losophies. A genuine harmony between social practise and a single
philosophy can hardly be attained until Plato's philosopher-king
shall arrive, whether he be an individual or a democratic nation rea-
sonably harmonized in its philosophy. There seems, however, from
the evolutionary point of view to be something peculiarly precious
about the preservation of individualities, even at the price of con-
flicts, perhaps for the very reason that conflicts occur, and one may
be permitted to doubt whether the unified social philosophy would
be, in the long run, a thing to be desired.
It must be emphasized that the division of philosophy into three
parts is not to be taken ontogenetically. It is not the order in which
a philosophy shapes itself in the mind of the philosopher. He is
likely to begin with some glimpse of the second part, theoretical con-
struction, to return from this to science to test its plausibility, then,
learning unnoted or unknown facts, to modify his construction and
play back and forth in this fashion, with occasional excursions into
the realm of practise, until the first two parts of his philosophy and
some sketch of the third have matured themselves together in his
mind. When he is able to put the maturing system to work, even if
limited to the scope of his own life, the interplay of parts is greatly
augmented, with marked benefit to the whole. Unfortunately, the
craving for order and plan are so strong with some men that they
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 295
do approximate in creation the formal order of exposition. They
are the pedantic minds of history. But even in such cases there is
usually a discrepancy between the end and the beginning. The
third stage is most likely to actually follow the other two, if it is
attained at all, and here again the attempt to find means of realiza-
tion often reacts upon the ideas that it is intended to realize and
results in their modification. Such reactions are beneficial and the
lack of them is the source of the frequent uselessness of philosophers,
rather than the unwillingness of the public to use them that Plato
offers as an explanation of neglect.
Eiach part of a developed philosophy has its own specific types of
error and requires a special type of criticism. With respect to meta-
physics there are three frequent sources of error : relevant facts es-
tablished by science may be overlooked, pseudo-scientific conclusions
may be invented to fill undesired gaps in science, and the emotional
appeal of some conclusion may lead to a false interpretation, mis-
understanding or distortion >of undenied scientific facts. Besides
these, inconsistent reasoning is a minor factor in the systems of great
men. When it occurs, the cause is usually preoccupation with some
particular phase of a problem, or a shifting of point of view that
has occurred in some long period during which the thought has
been maturing, with neglect to make corresponding corrections in
the foundations. Much difficulty in philosophic criticism arises
from first entering the systems to be criticized by accepting their
premises and then trying to burst them asunder by forcing incon-
sistencies to appear through misrepresentation of the philosopher's
words, a procedure justly to be condemned. The most common
course is an over-simplification of points of view, as in attempting
to reject idealisms, realisms or mysticisms as a class.
It is to be noted, however, that the presence of any or all of these
defects does not necessarily brand a philosophy as without value.
At worst, it is merely not established, for, as every logician knows,
the falsity of the grounds does not establish the falsity of the con-
clusion, but only destroys the claim to proof. Eadical error, par-
ticularly of the type of distortion and neglect of fact, greatly in-
creases the probability of failure. But the philosopher is always
hungry for new scientific discoveries and if he seizes upon them be-
fore they are adequately established, he is abetted by the scientist
who is equally prone to hastily assume philosophic worth for his
ideas, with as weak comprehension of the real demands of philosophy
as the most Utopian philosopher can exhibit of those of science.
Thle second part of a philosophy is really the most elusive. It is
easy to make a construction that it is not possible for human beings
296 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
to realize, or one that if realized would turn out to be not at all
what was intended in its effects. In the first case the result is not a
philosophy at all but a mere dream, soothing to the emotions, per-
haps, but not unqualifiedly beneficial to the whole man since its
unrealizable character will introduce conflicts into the demands of
action. Such Utopias may have their place in literature as imag-
inary compensations for much that is drab in daily life and are
harmless if not confused with demands for a practical programme.
In the second case the danger lies in bitterness and disillusionment
and, at worst, in social confusion and disintegration.
Unintended effects are easily introduced into a philosophy. We
are in the habit of speaking of our actions in general terms and come
to forget that we are really doing much more than our words imply.
A man says he is looking for work, but the really important side of
his action may be that he is rendering socially useful energies that
might otherwise be turned to harm for himself and others, or he may
be protecting his family from starvation or illness, or he may be on
the road to some world-revolutionizing discovery. Similarly, a phi-
losopher may believe that he is correcting some of the world's evils
when he is really introducing other and greater evils in their place.
Fichte or Hegel would hardly have intended the direction of German
"civilization that was derived from them. Our social philosophies
only too often exhibit the consequences visioned by William Morris
in the Dream of John Ball: "I pondered all these tlhings, and how
mien fight and lose the battle, and the thing that they fought for
comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes turns out not
to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they
meant under another name. ' '
The moral is that in the present state of our knowledge no rigid
speculative philosophy is possible or desirable. We can make clear
some goals probably worthy of attainment, but our speculative phi-
losophy must be rather an outline within which to work than an
ultimate system. We can probably never wholly escape this situa-
tion, at least not until the scope of our psychological and sociological
knowledge is extended vastly beyond the bounds of our present
vision, but it is a foolish sloth for fear of present and temporary
partial failure to neglect to utilize to the utmost the resources at
our command. A perfect ideal construction would have to be based
on a full understanding of all the capacities and possible forms of
human nature and be so drawn that our many and diversified ten-
dencies should be integrated into coherent, consistent and conse-
quently frictionless characters, adjusted to the conditions of a social
and physical environment, moulded, in so far as external facts admit,
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 297
to be congenial to it. As man is more plastic than inanimate nature,
the brunt of such reconstruction must fall upon him, his social or-
ganization, and his capacity to shape nature to greater harmony with
his needs.
Given an ideal construction, more or less perfect, and the third
part of the philosophic task is set: to translate this into a specific
programme of action. In our customs and institutions we see frag-
ments of such philosophies at work. Unfortunately they are only
fragments and the result is often confusion and conflict. Thus the
consumer seeks to obtain from industrialism services that shall free
him from the distracting activities of producing for himself a suffi-
cient variety of goods to satisfy his manifold wants. His aim is
liberation for specialization on some task that is congenial to his
nature. Although he may not be conscious of it, his action is based
on a philosophy that recognizes the importance of individual differ-
ences and the utilization of them to transfer to the race, or at least
to a selected part of it, that self-sufficiency and completeness that
primitive society left to the individual and biological analogy ex-
hibits as characteristic of living organisms. To the workman, espe-
cially the unskilled laborer, his livelihood presents the most mo-
mentous question. His natural philosophy is that consequent upon
the acceptance of the doctrine of the will to live <and the struggle for
survival, whether it take the form of elimination of the unfit, free
competition, or of a banding together of the weak to wage successful
war with the strong. The capitalist, on the other hand, transforms
the will to live into the will to power. Mere livelihood is assured
and the fuller scope of his activities demands domination over others
with the imposition of his will and ideas. These three philosophies
mean that the consumer seeks fundamentally plentiful supply and
low prices; the laborer, high) wages; and the capitalist, monopoly.
T(he result is daily manifest in our civilization and expresses itself
as class warfare. A comprehensive philosophy should harmonize
these differences.
But this is only one problem. Our moral conceptions vacillate
between an ideal of individual responsibility and of external regula-
tion of an individual's conduct to force him to a common mould.
In education, much vocational training is aimed at fitting men for
jobs, that is, adapting them for niches that must be filled in our social
organization, yet ideally, we talk about producing leaders who think
for themselves, originate, create. In religion we hold to our dogma,
extol the humble and praise the unworldly, yet, in practise, the
humble are trampled upon, and the unworldly are neglected or
merely the objects of a somewhat cynical wit.
298 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
Some contemplative minds, at the sight of these irrationalities
of living, are tempted to wipe out the disturbing factors rather than
to recognize them. Thus a philosophic anarchism is willing to elimi-
nate not only industrialism but practically all social organization
whatsoever. Conceptions of morality easily become exchanged for
crude ideas of success or dropped entirely under the protection of
the Nietzschian "beyond good and evil," with no respect, be it said,
to Nietzsche's real meaning. Denials of the worth of religion, in
practise if not in words, are too characteristic of our age to require
comment. Education has been more successful in maintaining its
hold, however its present forms are criticized. It is, perhaps, the
one social achievement that no man raises his voice to abolish. Even
this, however, is not true of higher education.
One fact remains pertinent : whenever these negative philosophies
have had a chance to translate themselves into practise, be it on ever
so limited a scale, the weakness of the negation has appeared. An-
archistic association requires voluntary agreements which have to be
strengthened by training and social approvals until they approxi-
mate the enforcement of laws. Religious negations often end in an
Unknowable such as Spencer calls God, to cite Mr. Bradley, because
he doesn't know what the Devil else it can be. Rousseau's pro-
gramme of uncompelled education consents to a sort of suggestive
discipline and Nietzsche's verbal denial of morality turns into an
advocacy of a more strict morality than the one he denied.
The real need, then, is not for a destruction of human achieve-
ments but for a consideration of them from a single point of view
under which a greater degree of harmonization of their aims and
consequences can be attained by intelligent discrimination. That is,
they need to be related to a single philosophic background or meta-
physics. Unreflectively, man tends to accept the wants he finds on
the surface and it is only when he has had some experience in realiz-
ing them that he finds that they are not his true or deepest wants.
From many such experiences of failure he comes to turn his reflec-
tions upon himself, his world, and the relations in which these stand
to each other. Then he may start to accumulate knowledge and to
integrate his desires anew. From time to time turned back by new
failures, he persistently renews his attempt.
A moment of recognized defect in our life attitudes and in what
we have sanctioned by them turns us into metaphysicians, seekers
after fundamental principles. Hence the justification of consider-
ing a philosophy as an individual achievement functioning as a sort
of mental hygiene. It absorbs the energy turned back by conflicts
that obstruct our progress and redirects it in a manner to lend life
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 299
new energy that may swell the tide of further advance. And this
achievement is not merely individual, for unity is after all consti-
tuted by the interaction of individuals on each other, and whatsoever
adds to their energy and removes unnecessary friction between them
contributes to the integration of the whole.
Contemporary American life particularly needs a working phi-
losophy, for it is teeming with proffered means to ends in proportion
as the consideration of the value of ends is lacking. The question,
what it is really worth while for men to be about, needs far deeper
consideration. The evidence is that so few will face it. The com-
pensating activity is in being practical (?), in being too busy to
think, even though this attitude is like that of a man nearing a preci-
pice on a toboggan who should count his buttons to avoid the respon-
sibility of steering.
It is then necessary, if a man is going to philosophize successfully,
that he should reflect upon scientific knowledge in so far as it bears
upon problems imposed by the act of living. At the basis of this act
lies the need of orientation with respect to the cosmos in general.
This orientation results in such conceptions as mechanism and tele-
ology, and is largely the result of reflection upon the discoveries of
the physical sciences. The result is important as defining the scope
within which religious and moral ideals may develop fruitfully.
From the study of biological conceptions comes the conviction as to
the extent to which man must reckon himself an integral part of the
cosmic structure and admit his dependence upon it. In psycho-
logical knowledge lies the understanding of his specific behavior as
man and his potentialities of modification. With this knowledge the
scientific background from which philosophy starts, its metaphysical
materials, are complete.
The omission of the so-called social sciences from this list does
not, however, mean that they are alien to philosophy. Quite the
opposite. But these sciences include the results of the operation of
human intelligence, desire and emotion among their data, and conse-
quently their very data already incorporate the results of philoso-
phizing. These sciences are no longer a part of a metaphysical foun-
dation of philosophy but materials of its critical development.
Human decisions can not affect the existence of the entities with
which the laws of physical, biological and psychological sciences con-
cern themselves. They can create or destroy the institutions and
customs concerning which social laws may be formulated. We can
not abolish atoms, solar systems or chromosomes by any philosophy,
but endogomy, exogomy, tariffs, or capital punishment exist, as it
were, only on philosophic suffrance. A society has a metaphysics,
300 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
however rudimentary, before it becomes the subject matter of science.
And this metaphysics goes back to the natural sciences as enumerated
above.
HAROLD CHAPMAN BROWN.
STANFORD UNIVERSITY.
STRICT IMPLICATION AN EMENDATION
MR. E. L. POST, of the department of mathematics in Columbia
University, calls my attention to an error in the development
of the system of ' ' Strict Implication, ' ' as presented in Chapter V of
A Survey of Symbolic Logic. The postulate 1.8,
(p -* q) = H * ~p)i
is equivalent to the pair,
2.2 (p * q) 1 (~q -J ~p)
2.21 H"l~pH(2Mg).
Of these, 2.21, "If 'q is impossible' implies 'p is impossible,' then p
implies #," is false. It is consistent with the other principles as-
sumed, but is incompatible with the intended meaning of the primi-
tive idea " impossibility," and with the distinction of this from the
idea of simple falsity.
Mr. Post's example which demonstrates the falsity of 2.21 is not
here reproduced, since it involves the use of a diagram and would
require considerable explanation. Suffice it to say that it is entirely
convincing. His proof that 2.21 leads to the consequence
~p = -p
is as follows :
2.21: H-J -?)*(?*?) (1)
1.02: dMg) = ~(p-g) (2)
1.02 [~q/p; ~p/q] :~q-*~p= ~(~g- ~p) (3)
(3), (2): (1)= ~H~PH -(?-<?) (4)
(1) K-gp)/?; (p -?)/?}:
[~H - ~P) -* -(P -?)1 [(P -9) * H - ~P)1 (5)
(5): (4)-J ?-?*-?--? (6)
(6) {-p/q}:p-(-p)4(~-p)(-~p) (7)
2.51: (7) = pp*(~-p)(-~p) (8)
2.81: (8) = p-J(~-p)(-~p) (9)
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 301
2.1 1~ -p/p; - -p/g} : (~ -p) (- ~p) H ~ -p (10)
1.6 {(~-p)(-^)/g;~-p/rj:(9)x(10)-Jp-J--p (11)
(11) {-p/p} : -p.|~-(-p) (12)
2.51: (12) = -?*- (13)
1.7: -p-i-p (14)
1.06: (13) x (14) = (~p = -p)Q.E.D.
Since the distinction of "impossibility" from simple falsity is
essential to that of "strict" from "material" relations, the presence
of this consequence of 2.21 would be to reduce the system to a redun-
dant form of "Material Implication."
To correct this error, postulate 1.8 must be replaced by the prin-
ciple given as theorem 2.2,
(p * q) -J (~q 4 ~p),
and theorems 2.7, 2.712, 2.72, 2.731, 2.75, 2.76, and 2.77 all of which
are alternative forms of 2.21 or 1.8 must be deleted. The proof of
the remaining theorems, with the further exceptions to be mentioned
immediately, will not be affected; and the important results and
general character of the system will still be as presented in the book.
The transformation set forth in Section III, which proves that
Material Implication is a subsystem in Strict Implication, can not
be carried out in all details in the manner proposed, since theorems
4.3 4.37 of that section involve 2.21 and are invalid. But this
transformation can be otherwise effected, as is demonstrated by the
fact that all the symbolic postulates for Material Implication given
in Principia Mathematica can still be deduced. In the proof of these
postulates, as given in Section III, the only use of 2.21 or its conse-
quences is in 4.54 and 4.55, which are lemmas to 4.56, and in 4.57.
But 4.56 and 4.57 can be otherwise proved as follows :
Lemma 1. p 4 (q c p q)
Proof: 2.4: pq-ipq (1)
4.52 (l) = pH(gcp0)
Lemma 2. (p -I q) c (p r c q r)
Proof: Lemma 1 : q -J (r c q r) (I)
1.6: {(p^)bi(rcgr)]HIp(rcgr)] (2)
4.15: [pH(rcgr)H[pc(rc0r)] (3)
1.6: (2) x(3) {(p*q) [q* (rcqr)]}-* [pc (rcqr)] (4)
4.52: (4) = (1) H (p 4 q) c [p c (r c q r)] (5)
302 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
4.51: (5) = (p*q)c(prcqr)
Theorem 4.56. (p c q) c (p r c q r)
Proof: Lemma 2 {(pcq)p/q\:
{[(pcq)p]4q}c{[(pcq)p]rcqr} (1)
2.91: (1)= {[(pcq)p]*q} C {[(pcq) (pr)]cqr} (2)
4.53: (2)x4.53-i[(pcg)(pr)]cgr (3)
4.51 : (3) = (p c q) c (p r c q r)Q.E.D.
Theorem 4-57. (pcq) = (-gc-p)
Proof: 2-8, 2-51: -(p-g) = -[-<?-(-?)] (D
1-03: (1) = l(pcq) = (-gc-p)]Q.E.D.
For similar reasons, postulate L of the set given for the " Cal-
culus of Ordinary Inference" should be
L. (p q 4 r s) -J (poq -J ros).
C. I. LEWIS
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA.
REVIEWS AND ABSTRACTS OF LITERATURE
Authority in the Modern State. HAROLD J. LASKI. New Haven:
Yale University Press. 1919. Pp. 398.
Usually, we do not understand the institutions we take for
granted, and unwittingly we obey Burke 's admonition and reverence
them. Such has been our attitude toward the state. Of late, when
our own political philosophers discussed it, they did so nearly always
to justify its existing form of organization. When our political
scientists dealt with it, they seldom did more than describe and
classify its organs of government.
Mr. Laski breaks with this tradition. His view of the state is
heretical, although he hides his non-conformity behind an awe-inspir-
ing mass of pointed references and excellent foot-notes. He inquires
into the problem of state authority and the nature of obedience. To
Mr. Laski the state is the people organized politically. He would
say with William Graham Sumner "the state is all of us," but would
add, "yet, not all of each of us." There are innumerable human
interests which lie outside the purview of the state, which, after all,
is no more than one of the innumerable group units of which society
is composed. While the state and government are not identical, it
is through government that the state functions, and thus, any real-
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 303
istic analysis of the modern state will actually be an analysis of
government. The doctrine of sovereignty is but a legal fiction,
which has, in fact, already broken down. The state is entitled to no
loyalty from its members which it has not freely won from them
through service. It is the co-equal rather than the superior of the
other group units which go to make up society. The individual may
be, and he usually is, a member of several groups. Obedience to the
state, viz., obedience to the persons who constitute the government,
must rest ultimately upon free individual response. In a clash be-
tween the state and a non-political group the individual must be left
free to choose as to which he will give his adherence. Good citizen-
ship consists in contributing to society the best in one's personality.
Yet without freedom this is impossible. The sovereign state, which
lays first claim upon the loyalty of citizens, is the denial of freedom.
And the claim of unquestioned obedience is most dangerous at the
very times when it is most vigorously exerted at times of crisis for
it deprives the state of free counsel at the hour of its greatest need,
and takes from the individual his freedom of choice in a moment of
most vital import.
But, this work tries to show, the doctrine of sovereignty has in
fact broken down. The state's own civil servants have demanded
the right, now freely accorded other workers, to form associations
and to strike. In France, and since the author's writing in Great
Britain, in Canada and in Massachusetts, civil servants, including
even the police, have organized and conducted strikes against the
arbitrary power of the state. Their governments have vigorously
condemned them, have loudly asserted the doctrine of sovereignty
and have finally yielded to their servants' demands.
The present state organization stands counter to the facts of
social life. Society has become too complex, interests have grown
too varied, for the "knowledge necessary to the parts and of the
whole" to be concentrated "at a common center," as Tom Paine
thought possible. The "new synthesis" at whose threshold Mr.
Laski tells us we stand, will be a federalistic society, functionally as
well as territorially. The function of production will be separated
as completely as possible from the interest of consumption. Ques-
tions of law will continue as at present to be matters for the courts.
Here Mr. Laski is far from enlightening. We take it, though, that
what he objects to in the state as it is organized to-day is its out-
grown legislative and administrative authority trying to perform
functions and pretending to exercise powers which under existing
conditions are far beyond its competence. To the state as final ar-
biter Mr. Laski seems to have no objection. He even looks with
304 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
favor upon a tribunal of "especial dignity like the Supreme Court
of the United States, ' ' to settle disputes between conflicting interests
and authorities. Yet, he tells us nothing of who is to make the law
which the court is to administer, of what authority is to organize
the court, and who is to enforce its decree.
Yet, it must be remembered that this book is not a systematic
treatise upon the theory of the state. It is rather a series of studies,
more or less related, upon what is perhaps the central problem of
politics: the nature and limitations of state authority. The author
elucidates his own position through an analysis of the theories of
French philosophers of the post-revolutionary period. This part of
Mr. Laski's work does the double service of helping to clarify his
position and of acquainting an English speaking public with the
thought of Bonald, Brunetiere, Bourget, Lamennais and Eoyer-
Collard.
To those of us who insist upon "solutions," Mr. Laski's volume
will be disappointing. He doesn't build a Utopia, he studies a prob-
lem. The process of government to-day is the process of the adjust-
ment of various group interests. The representative legislature, in
fact, promulgates as the law of the state the demands of those groups
which are able to exert strong enough pressure upon it. The modern
state is the organ of the dominant group in society. Its function,
we are told, is to maintain "law and order." To the dominant
group "order" is the existing order, and law is an instrument to
maintain the status quo, rather than a method by which to effect
progressive change. ' * To make the state omnicompetent is to leave it
at the mercy of any group that is powerful enough to exploit it,
... is to make it the creature of those who can possess themselves
of its instruments" (p. 385).
Mr. Laski seeks the solution of his problem through the limitation
of state authority on the one hand, and the allowing of a great
measure of autonomy to social and functional groups on the other.
The state will be recognized as one group within society, performing
certain specific functions. Its importance, as compared with that of
other groups, will be measured by the service it performs, rather
than by the dignity which it claims.
STERLING D. SPERO.
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY.
Army Mental Tests'- C. S. YOAKUM, 'and R. M. YERKES. New York:
Henry Holt & Co. 1920. Pp. 303.
This book puts into conveniently accessible form the methods
for the examination of recruits employed by the Surgeon General's
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 305
Office, with their chief results and implications. Its importance to
the mental examiner is sufficiently indicated 'by partial enumeration
of its contents. There are reviewed the requisite features of a large-
scale group test suitable for military use, also the various checks
applied through other criteria of intelligence. The alpha scale is
most satisfactory above 11 years, while the beta scale is less satis-
factory at the high intelligence levels. The relation of intelligence
ratings to occupational specifications is 'discussed. Among the sta-
tistics the reviewer has not seen elsewhere are those showing the
proportion of low and high grade men in typical military groups;
also the detail of intelligence findings for officers in different
branches of the service, and the relation of intelligence to rank,
This last is practically zero. The Examiner's Guide is reproduced,
and keys for tests are added. The various tests of the army per-
formance scale are closely described, and the important scoring
table of Healy's newer picture completion test is included. There
are some paragraphs on buildings and equipment. Account follows
of tests made in the S. A. T. C. and in colleges. There are quoted
statistical tables showing among other things the 'distribution of
alpha scores in various institutions, the incidence of the higher
grades in various institutions, military and otherwise; the com-
parison of men and women, and of different departments of the
same institution. There is practically no difference between men
and women or between different departments, and but little between
different collegiate years. There is liberal quotation from signifi-
cant articles by Yoakum, by Dode, and by Yerkes. The Leaven-
worth Disciplinary Barracks tested about equally with the draft.
Conscientious objectors averaged somewhat higher. It would be of
interest to know how " sincere" objectors compare with "insincere"
ones ; the higher average as a whole is not surprising, the objection
implying as it does some rationalizing tendency supported by higher
"intelligence." In discussing industrial applications, as related to
intelligence specifications of different occupations, note is made of a
slightly negative correlation observed with one species of manual
skill. In conclusion, the forms for the tests and other military
records are reproduced.
Theoretical bearings of the material will 'be obvious, though this
book is not intended to develop them. It is an impertinence to
praise a volume which focuses the best powers of American psy-
chology upon its subject. One formal suggestion might be offered.
A book inviting such frequent reference would be convenient to
have in pocket form, something with limp covers and round corners,
after the fashion of Davenport's Statistical Methods. Royalties of
the volume are fitly offered to the advancement of psychology
306 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
through the National Research Council. "The degree of practical
success in the application of such a measure may well be considered
one of the major achievements of the war. ' '
F. L. WELLS.
MCLEAN HOSPITAL.
JOURNALS AND NEW BOOKS
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL CLINIC, December, 1919. A Demon-
stration Clinic (pp. 1-17) : By the Staff of the Psychological Clinic,
University of Pennsylvania. - Eight cases are described in detail.
These cases were demonstrated in the Psychological Clinic of the
University of Pennsylvania. The record of the patients includes
name, age, whom referred by, cause, school attended, age entered,
school history, diagnosis, recommendation, Terman Revision mental
age, basal age, and I. Q., physical condition, educational status at
time of examination reading, letters known, arithmetic, number of
hours instruction, present status, speech work. The Meaning of a
Binet Score (pp. 18-26) : H. J. HUMPSTONE. - The meaning of the
Binet score is a performance level on the intelligence scale. This is
one element useful in giving a diagnosis of the child's mental ability.
The Present Status of the Subnormal Class (pp. 27-32) : FRANCIS N.
MAXFEELD. - The problem of the mentally defective child until he is
sixteen years old is presented. The large part of the social problem
after he is sixteen is also given with suggestions for meeting it.
Shell-Shock (pp. 33-50) : T. E. SULLENGER. - The term "shell-shock"
has been adopted officially as a diagnostic term to cover all neuroses
arising among officers and soldiers of the army. Nine cases are de-
scribed. Considerable stress is laid on the psychological aspects of
the war neurosis. An Analysis of the Proficiency and Competency
of a Fourth Grade Class (pp. 51-58) : GLADYS E. PooLE.-A survey
was made of 30 pupils of nine different nationalities. The tests used
were: Arithmetic Series B, Monroe Standardized Silent Reading
Test, Courtis Standardized Research Test in Reading, Thorndike
Visual Vocabulary Scale A-2, Ayres Measuring Scale for Handwrit-
ing, Ayres Measuring Scale for Ability in Spelling. Some of these
pupils absolutely lacked fourth grade competency. Proficiency
tests should be given and the child's proficiency accurately deter-
mined before promotion. Diagnostic Teaching (pp. 59-65) : G. G.
IDE. -A very interesting case of a boy with deficient energy is de-
scribed. The Classification of Criminals (pp. 66-74) : CARL MURCHI-
soN.-The classification of several hundred criminals according to
the Alpha Group Examination was made. Some Problems at Work
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 307
Age Level (pp. 75-87) : G. G. IDE. -The problems of the fourteen
year old boy who is mentally deficient are discussed. Six cases are
described. The Training of Very Bright Children (pp. 88-96) :
LIGHTNER WITHER. - A very bright child is one who has such a high
measure of competency that he is able to learn more than the pre-
scribed curriculum, within the prescribed time, under the prescribed
conditions. A farmer does not try to cultivate weeds and grain in
the same field. Let us be very optimistic and confidently await the
day when education will be as scientifically and intelligently directed
as agriculture.
Industrial Administration. A Series of Lectures by A. B. BERRIMAN,
ST. GEORGE HEATH, LEONARD HILL, T. B. JOHNSON, A. F. STAN-
LEY KENT, T. M. LEGGE, T. H. PEAR, B. SEEBOHM ROWNTREE.
Manchester, Eng. : University Press. New York : Longmans
Green & Co. 1920. Pp.203. $3.
NOTES AND NEWS
THE Board of Governors of the University of Manitoba, Winni-
peg, Canada, announce that they will proceed shortly to appoint a
professor of philosophy and invite applications for the chair. This
is to be the first appointment in the Department of Philosophy and
Psychology recently established. The initial salary will be $3,800.
The successful applicant will be expected to enter upon his duties on
or about September 1, 1920. Five printed or typewritten copies of
letter of application and testimonials should be in the hands of the
Secretary of the Board of Governors on or before June 20, 1920.
WE borrow from Science for May 14, 1920, the following account
of the proposed formation of Anglo-American libraries for Central
Europe :
"It is proposed to establish in Central Europe under British-
American auspices libraries of recent English books indispensable to
university teachers. The work is being organized on a broad, non-
political, non-sectarian basis, so as to enlist the widest possible co-
operation. These libraries will supply on loan books needed by the
faculties of the different universities in Central Europe. They will
be under the charge of British and American representatives, and
committees of the foreign universities will be asked to superintend the
local administration. A committee of the six most important learned
societies in Germany and Austria has been formed for the carrying
out of the plan which, in addition to the loan library, will include a
308 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
system of exchange of publications and duplicates between any li-
braries and institutions willing to cooperate. The preliminary state-
ment of the trustees says :
"By thus taking the initiative in extending the hand of fellowship to col-
leagues in former enemy countries, British and American scholars are seizing a
timely opportunity of helping to heal the wounds of the war and of exemplifying
an a practical and convincing way the true 'international mind.'
"Viscount Bryce, Lord Robert Cecil and other English public
men have expressed their approval of the plan and have promised
their cooperation in carrying it out. The supporters of the plan in
Great Britain include: Gilbert Murray, Oxford; A. E. J. Rawlinson,
Oxford; C. S. Sherrington, Oxford; Walter Raleigh, Oxford; A. E.
Shipley* Cambridge ; J. J. Thomson, Cambridge ; A. S. Ramsay, Cam-
bridge ; Joseph Larmor, Cambridge ; Horace Darwin, Cambridge ; W.
B. Hardy, M.A., Cambridge ; Alfred Hopkinson, Glasgow ; Col. E. H.
Hills, Woolwich ; Henry A. Miers, Oxford ; Alex. Hill, Cambridge ;
George Paish, London; Rickman G. Godlee, London, and Michael
Sadler, Leeds.
"University teachers in the United Kingdom and America are
requested to give their approval and cooperation to the plan by send-
ing their names to the secretary, Mr. B. M. Headicar, librarian of the
London School of Economics (University of London), Clare Market,
London, W.C."
DR. CHARLES W. HENDEL, of Williams College, has accepted an
appointment as associate professor of philosophy at Princeton. His
successor at Williams is to be Dr. T. H. Proctor, now of Harvard.
DR. JAMES R. ANGELL, professor of psychology and dean of the
university faculties at the University of Chicago, has been elected
president of the Carnegie Corporation of New York. For the past
year Professor Angell has been chairman of the National Research
Council.
VOL. XVII, No. 12. JUNE 3, 1920
THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS
DE PROFANITATE
fcfc 'T~ OGIC must correspond to a fact of psychology," observed
-LJ Charles Peirce, "or it degenerates into a mathematical
recreation." The observation was quoted by Royce at his "logical
seminary," one evening during the last year of the seminary's ex-
istence. Royce had been seated at the head of the long oak table,
with chin in his hands as usual, and on his face the look of a day-
dreaming child whose thoughts were in fairyland. Those who did
not know him might have judged that his thoughts were remote
from the discussions which took place across the table but had any
one thought so, the sequel would have proved him wrong. Royce
had been assembling his battery and preparing to hit the center of
the argument.
A professor of philosophy had just been discussing the meaning
of implication, he had been expounding Bosanquet and had talked
of hypothetical propositions and of conditional propositions which
do not assert the existence of anything. Another had replied to him
with an exposition of the views of Bertrand Russell, and the discus-
sion at length concentrated on the question whether, at the beginning
of a logical undertaking, it can be assumed or ought to be admitted
that a false proposition implies a true proposition. One party as-
serted that a false proposition implies any proposition whatsoever,
another offered observations on the "independence of postulates,"
the blackboard was quickly covered with symbols, and the discussion
bade fair to become a discussion of what rules the assembly was will-
ing to accept as the rules of the game of logistic. We were in immi-
nent danger of deserting the thinking process altogether for the play
with symbols which is called mathematical logic. At this point Pro-
fessor Royce, for a long time silent, jumped squarely upon the cen-
tral issue. Whether we choose for a postulate that a false proposi-
tion implies any proposition, is, after all, not a matter of tremendous
purport. The important and real question is whether a false propo-
sition in our actual thinking does or does not imply any proposition
whatever not whether it can, but whether it does. Do we find it
309
310 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
functioning in this way in our habitual thinking ? We do. Profes-
sor Royce illustrated the fact by quoting popular profanity, the
Book of Ruth, a Gilbert and Sullivan opera, a sonnet of Shakespeare,
current slang, the Church of England marriage service, a lyric of
William Blake, and the use of certain adverbs in three of the lan-
guages of Europe.
When the clergyman in the story-book is confronted with a cir-
cumstance which he has not foreseen or which he has believed im-
possible, he says * ' I am blessed if it isn 't ! ' ' and intends to indicate
his astonishment that the thing undeniably is as it proves to be. By
the same speech with which he voices his surprise that it isn't, he
voices also his confidence that it is. His satisfaction concerning it
is so perfect that if, by any chance, it were not so, he would assert
that he is living in that state of blessedness for which he has so long
hoped that he now dares scarcely to aspire to it.
The average citizen, on the other hand, encountering an unex-
pected state of affairs, says of it, "Well, I'll be damned if it isn't!"
Obviously it is, and no doubt about it. When he offers to be cheer-
fully damned if it isn't, he is keeping well within the margin of
safety. But the logic works both ways. Surely it is apparent that
no man wants to be damned. Indeed the speaker, when he asserts
his willingness to be damned if and on the condition that it isn't,
appeals to whoever hears him to perceive the obvious, to perceive
that the proposition that he is willing to be damned is a false propo-
sition and to infer, from this false proposition, the true proposition
that the thing is.
Some offer to be cursed, or tortured, or badgered in a variety of
ways, some call down upon themselves the malevolence of the ele-
ments and of the deities, they offer to accept misfortunes which no
one would willingly undergo all to prove, by the assertion of a false
proposition, that some other proposition is true. The word, damn,
has become bad usage. When the Captain of H.M.S. Pinafore has
asserted that he never, or hardly ever, swore "with a big, big D,"
the chorus responds :
Then give three cheers and one cheer more,
For the well-bred Captain of the Pinafore!
The majority of the people, the larger part of the time, try to find
for their use in giving vigor and emphasis to their expression some
word which has not thus become an emblem of bad taste, "May I be
struck dumb if I am not speaking the truth " is a case in point, and
the expression ' ' May the Lord pour out his wrath upon me if this is
not true" translates literally to the rubber-stamp profanity of the
stage and the street. The well-bred person can and does swear with
entire propriety if he is guarded in his choice of words.
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 311
In one of the finest lyric passages of all literature, Ruth, swear-
ing to be forever devoted to Naomi, enumerates ways in which her
devotion will find concrete expression "thy people shall be my
people ; whither thou goest, I will go ; where thou diest I will die,
and there shall I be buried" and concludes her appeal with the
oath, "May the Lord do so to me and more also, if aught but death
part thee and me," The passage is high poetry, but the oath may
be paraphrased perfectly by the commonest cursing of the American
idiom.
The youthful enthusiast swears loyalty to his purpose "till Hell
freezes over" or "until there shall be the Millennium upon Earth"
according to his taste. It comes to the same thing in either case,
for neither is likely to happen. Both are practical contradictions in
terms. When the false shall be true, then it will be true that he will
be false to the object of his loyalty. So long as false is false and
true is true, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness
and in health, anyway, he will be devoted to his choice. While the
false is recognized as false, the truth of what he swears is implied
and demonstrated.
Logicians argue whether a false proposition implies a true propo-
sition and the man of everyday, who knows that it does, goes
blithely ahead and certifies it whenever he swears. And we all
swear in hard words or in soft for all swearing is not vulgar
language, and there is much swearing that is not cursing. The man
of everyday, when he swears, fulfils the pragmatist specification by
acting as if a false proposition implies a true one. But he also does
better than that. He finds in his thinking process, ' * in the field ' ' as
the geologist would say, in the thinking process which is the labora-
tory of logic, false propositions constantly implying and demonstrat-
ing true ones. It is not a thing to be argued. It is a fact of
psychology.
In the sonnet where he describes the constancy of true love,
Shakespeare having concluded his exposition, wishes to say that he
is confident of its correctness, and adds:
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
Obviously he has written, and obviously men have loved. By this
token therefore his remarks about true love are not error, but are
true. Indeed if things as obviously true as they were false, then
anything would be true and the laws of right thinking would no
longer have any relevancy and pertinence.
Hamlet knew very well that a false proposition implies any
312 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
proposition, as is testified by his conversation with Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern wherein he plays a logical trick upon them and parries,
when in their turn they try the same trick on him, leading them
away into a discussion of the subjectivity of judgments of value and
flippantly to one of the central problems of metaphysics. To his
inquiry, "What news?" Rosencrantz replies, "None, my lord, but
that the world's grown honest." Hamlet answers, "Then is dooms-
day near ; but your news is not true. " If a proposition as palpably
false as this, that the world has grown honest, were by any chance
true, then anything would be true, then doomsday would be near.
But the proposition happily is not true. Hamlet then inquires wjiat
his good friends have deserved at the hands of fortune that she sends
them to prison thither.
Guil. Prison, my lord!
Ham. Denmark's a prison.
Eos. Then is the world one.
Ham. A goodly one; in which there are many confines, wards, and dun-
geons; Denmark being one o' the worst.
Bos. We think not so, my lord.
Rosencrantz, who is more logical-minded than his companion, treats
Hamlet's observation that Denmark is a prison as a false proposi-
tion by inferring from it the any-proposition, "Then is the world
one." Hamlet, pleased with the inference, which seems to him to
be the legitimate deduction from a true proposition, proceeds to
dilate upon it and forces him to the flat statement that he thinks
that the proposition is false. Thereupon Hamlet shows the incom-
petence of this reply by pointing out that such a judgment has only
a subjective validity. It is true or false independently of objective
standards, and is not to be taken, if false, as a basis for the deduc-
tion of any proposition.
Ham. Why, then 'tis none to you: for there is nothing either good or bad,
but thinking makes it so. To me it is a prison.
When a man swears, he asserts a false proposition, usually in
simple and direct terms. He infers from it an any-proposition
which he dresses in language as grotesque as his taste may dictate.
The more grotesque the any-proposition, the more poetic the swear-
ing and the stronger hold it takes upon the imagination witness
Rabelais, "May I never be hang'd, if 'twas not a Comical Sight."
The particular choice of verbs for the asserted false proposition
determines the flavor of the swearing, whether it be good or bad,
for the oaths of the roughneck and the oaths of the devotee are fre-
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 313
quently identical in their sense. The palpable absurdity of the in-
ferred any-proposition acts upon the mind of the hearer as evidence
that the first-asserted false proposition is false indeed. The wide
prevalence of this sort of thinking, both in the higher atmosphere
of poetry and in the common swearing of the streets, seems to indi-
cate that such an order in the presentation of ideas gives vigor
to conviction and provides a medium for the exercise of strong
language.
It is therefore no paradox, that strong language is unnecessary
for the use of him who would argue that a false proposition in our
actual thinking process does imply any proposition. The language
of the streets proves his contention. And the author of the present
paper, as far as the foregoing is concerned, appears to be in what
Emerson has somewhere described as the false position of defending
the obvious. But valid conclusions rest ultimately on such an ap-
peal ; and it may now be noted that logic, if it is the science which
deals with the actual objective properties of actual thoughts, the
relations between them, and with the mechanism and procedure of
their action, is a different thing from the deductive science of
mathematical logic or logistic which deals with defined and fre-
quently imaginary things without questioning behind the definition.
Logisticians have been known to boast that their conclusions would
still be true if there were no world at all or only a world with no
thinking intelligence in it.
All science and indeed all human activity needs logic. It is
impossible even to go from the soup through the rest of the dinner
without frequently taking advantage of the laws, or principles, or
whatever else it is that constitutes the science, of logic. And logic
in some sense is an objective or natural science after all. A given
proposition implies a certain other proposition or it does not. Given
the first proposition, a perceiving person can infer the second or he
can not. The facts of the science are no more debatable than the
facts of physical science, yet logic, among all the sciences, is unique.
For all of them it is the science of procedure. And methodology is
the science of scientific procedure.
No science can get along without logic ; and, as each science has
its special subject-matter, so, in many cases, it has also its ''special
logic." This "special logic" is another or secondary science and
has for its subject-matter highly-specialized, exactly-defined, imag-
inary things, such as entropy, molecular weight, chemical affinity,
specific heat, rigid implication, vector quantities, the square root of
minus one, etc., etc. But these secondary and deductive sciences
are not branches of logic properly so-called ; they are not sciences of
procedure, but, as far as their intent and application are concerned,
are part of the actual procedure itself.
314 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
In their intent these secondary deductive sciences provide tools
and means for the operation of the more concrete and perfectly ob-
jective natural sciences. And it is without doubt this demand on
the part of the concrete sciences for tools which has given rise to
the existence of the secondary sciences as is manifest in the fact
that geometry was born in ancient Egypt, called into existence by
the necessity of re-surveying the land after the subsidence of the
annual Nile floods. These secondary sciences, however, are after
all sciences which deal with the properties of things, though defined
things, and they have a fascination and lure for their devotees
which lead them on to define other things more or less similar to
the original objects of their study and to delve into the properties
of these new things even though this study has now no longer any
value as part of the procedure of the primary science. In this way
the secondary sciences often advance farther or in other directions
than the primary sciences which have called them into existence,
and often they run into blind alleys, and occasionally they lag be-
hind. There are frequently gaps in the one and waste places in
the others. Present mathematics has developments which will
surely prove to be tools for the elucidation of some of the recent
discoveries of physics. Clerk Maxwell, when he undertook the
study of vortices, found ready for his hand the mathematical equip-
ment of his procedure.
No branch of human endeavor needs logic more than philosophy.
"While the physical sciences can, if need be, naively proceed about
their business, making only unconscious use of logic as uncon-
scious as the man who wields a pick the conscious and critical use
of logic is as necessary for a philosopher as the habit of accurate
observation is for the man who works in a laboratory. In a very
general sense the aim of philosophy seems to be the examination of
the purport and significance, the connection and purpose of things.
The physical and the more recent psychological sciences have never
really usurped any part of the territory of philosophy, and they
never can. The student of physics who picked up Paradise Lost,
read for a few minutes, and threw down the book with the question,
"What does it prove?" was more of a philosopher than he would
willingly admit. Philosophy will always be concerned with the sig-
nificance of the concrete sciences and with the relation of the knowl-
edge which they produce to knowledge of other kinds which is de-
rived from other sources. Thus, one of the problems of meta-
physics is the relation between the knowledges-derived from the con-
crete science of physics and that derived from the deductive science
of mathematics. And meta-logic will have to discuss the purport
of logic, its significance, and relevance, and the relation, if any, of
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 315
this concrete primary science to the secondary deductive science of
mathematical logic or logistic. The subject of the present paper,
then, is a meta-logical one. If it succeeds merely in putting the
question its purpose will have been accomplished.
When the mathematical logician boasts that his science is one
which studies the properties of denned things similar to those which
occur in the thinking process but not having any necessary connec-
tion with them, he seems to me to talk like a man whose life is dedi-
cated to the study of the Phoenix or the Basilisk. Perhaps I mis-
understand; and this paper, after all, is only a plea for enlighten-
ment. James Stuart Mill said that genius is the ability to perceive
remote connections and gave basis for an excellent definition of
philosophy as the study of relevance and of purport. If logistic
is really a part of philosophy, it would seem that the logisticians
might give us a discussion of the relevance of mathematical logic.
The significance of a symbolistic shorthand representation of a
train of thinking is plain enough. What of the volumes of theo-
rems derived by developing the defined properties of symbols?
What of this science that C. I. Lewis has shown to be only a game,
played according to rules, with quids and with quods? Strong
language puts the question forcefully. And a discussion of it by
the logisticians would be a contribution to meta-logic.
TENNEY L. DAVIS.
MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY.
SOCIETIES
THE TWENTIETH ANNUAL MEETING OF THE WESTERN
PHILOSOPHICAL ASSOCIATION
WITH its annual meeting, on April 16 and 17, at the University
of Wisconsin, the Western Philosophical Association brought
to a strikingly successful close the twentieth year of its history. The
attendance, including instructors, assistants, and graduate students
from neighboring institutions, was the largest in years; the discus-
sion was thoroughly fresh and lively and the fellowship both genuine
and spirited. The pleasure and the profit of the meetings were both
enhanced in no small measure through the thoughtful arrangements
made by the local department of philosophy and through the kind-
ness of the Beta Theta Pi fraternity in placing its Lodge at the dis-
posal of the visiting members, thus enabling them to live in common
during their stay in Madison.
316 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
Under the new name of the Western Division of the American
Philosophical Association, and 1 in eager cooperation with the East-
ern Division, the organization now seeks a further expansion of its
usefulness. The possibilities inherent in joint undertakings were
promisingly augured in the business meeting. Following a resolu-
tion by which a committee was instructed to cooperate with a com-
mittee of the Eastern Division in arranging for a joint meeting
which, with invitations to other American and to foreign philosoph-
ical societies, might possibly be given the character of a philosoph-
ical congress, the announcement was made that Mrs. Carus had
generously made the offer of an honorarium, in memory of Dr. Paul
Carus, for a course of lectures to be given on the occasion of the first
joint meeting of the Divisions.
The presidential address by Professor Norman Wilde was de-
livered immediately after the annual dinner on Friday evening.
Selecting as his topic, ' ' The Attack on the State, ' ' President Wilde
presented a critique, both acute and constructive, of recent plural-
istic theories, and a defense of the view that political sovereignty
must be interpreted as very genuinely supreme and unitary.
A noteworthy feature of the meeting was the informal session or
gathering held on Saturday afternoon in the living room of the
Beta Theta Pi Lodge. Various matters of common interest were
considered. The greater part of the afternoon, however, was taken
up by discussions of various attempts now being made or projected
by American colleges and universities to provide students with a
twentieth century Weltanschauung, with an intelligent view of the
physical and the social environment in which modern life is carried
on, or with such knowledge as forms an indispensable prerequisite
for any serious study of metaphysics. The discussion was initiated
by a paper which Professor Gregory D. Walcott presented on "A
New Content Course in Philosophy." 1 The aim of the course which
Professor Walcott described and which he is this year giving in
Hamline University is to furnish a cross-sectional view of the world
as this is represented by the various sciences of to-day. Through the
series of books published by Henry Holt & Company as "The Home
University Library of Modern Knowledge," the students are intro-
duced to some fifteen or twenty sciences in the course of the year.
Only the more general and important points are stressed, and these
are brought into as complete and vital relations as possible, the whole
constituting a sort of neo-Positivistic or neo-Synthetic evolutionary
philosophy. For next year Professor Walcott is planning a com-
panion course on "A Philosophical Survey of Human Culture."
1 To be published in full in a later issue of this JOURNAL.
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 317
The most significant item of business transacted was the adoption,
with certain minor changes, of a report presented by Professor Alex-
ander, Chairman of the Committee on the Federation of Philosoph-
ical Associations. As amended and adopted, the report reads as
follows :
"The Committee of the Western Philosophical Association, con-
tinued for the purpose of carrying forward negotiations looking to
the federation of this Association with the American and the South-
ern Philosophical Associations, report as follows :
"1. While some members of the Southern Philosophical Associa-
tion have indicated interest in the proposals made, no definite re-
sponse has as yet been received.
"2. At the meeting of the American Philosophical Association
held in Ithaca, December 30 and 31, 1919, the following amendment
to Article I., Section 1, of its constitution, was unanimously passed :
" 'The name of this organization shall be the Eastern Division of
the American Philosophical Association.'
"Further, it was moved and carried that the matter of closer as-
sociation between the Eastern, Western and Southern Associations
be referred to the Committee on Organization and Attendance (Pro-
fessor Tufts, chairman) ; and it was suggested that in choosing a
place of meeting for next year (1920) a joint meeting with the West-
ern branch be considered.
"3. In view of the action of the American Philosophical Asso-
ciation, this committee recommends the following amendment and
resolution :
"I. The name of this association shall be the Western Division
of the American Philosophical Association.
' ' II. The members of this Association, in changing its name, ex-
press their cordial appreciation of the courtesy of the members of
the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association, and
the hope that the change of name may be the foretoken of a more
intimate asso3iation of the memberships of the two Divisions.
"4. The committee further recommend:
" (a} That the matter of securing a joint meeting be continued
with a committee appointed for this purpose, to act in consultation
with the committee similarly empowered by the Eastern Division.
"(&) That the members of the Western Division express their
hope that the first joint meeting, or congress, may be arranged to be
held in the first or second week of September, 1921, on the campus
of some university of the eastern states.
" (c) That the Western Division believe that the joint meeting
should be made the occasion for the extending of an invitation to
318 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
some American philosopher to deliver there a series of not less than
five lectures upon some philosophical topic, the lecturer to be chosen
by the committee organizing the programme.
" (d) That they also suggest the desirability of inviting the
presence of delegates from other philosophical societies, American
or foreign, thus giving the meeting the character of a philosophical
congress. ' '
The existing committee on Federation was appointed as the
committee mentioned in paragraph four of the above report. In
response to a letter from President Perry, of the Eastern Division,
the secretary was authorized to communicate to Professor Arm-
strong, chairman of a committee of the Eastern Division having in
charge matters relating to the sending of representatives to the ap-
proaching international philosophical gathering at Oxford, our de-
sire that the representatives selected bear the credentials of the
Western Division as well. In acceptance of an invitation from the
University of Chicago, it was resolved to hold the next annual meet-
ing of the Division at that institution. The generous offer by Mrs.
Paul Carus of a honorarium, in memory of Dr. Paul Carus, for a
course of lectures to be given at the first joint meeting with the
Eastern Division, was enthusiastically accepted and the secretary
was instructed to convey to Mrs. Carus the deep appreciation of the
Division. Resolutions of thanks were offered also to the University
of Wisconsin, its Department of Philosophy, and the local Beta
Theta Pi fraternity for their splendid hospitality to the members
and visiting friends of the Association.
The following persons were elected to membership in the Di-
vision : Albert R. Chandler, H. E. Cunningham, D. S. Robinson, A.
J. Schneeweiss, Ella Stokes, and W. C. Swabey.
The officers elected for the coming year were : President, E. L.
Hinman; Vice-president, W. L. Raub; Secretary-Treasurer, E. L.
Schaub ; Members of the Executive Committee, R. C. Lodge, A. W.
Moore, M. C. Otto, J. D. Stoops.
The treasurer's report indicated the possession of forty war sav-
ings stamps, in addition to balances in the checking and in the sav-
ings accounts, respectively, of $82.94 and $69.44.
The papers read at the meeting were as follows :
The Logical Status of Elementary and Reflective Judgments: R. C.
LODGE.
(Published in full in this JOURNAL, Vol. XVII., pp. 214-220.)
Some Lingering Misconceptions of Instrument alism : A. W. MOORE.
The justification of a discussion under this heading is found in
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 319
the fact that recent important literature revives certain misconcep-
tions of instrumentalism, which a year ago one would have said had
been finally disposed of. These misconceptions arise from unauthor-
ized extensions of the meaning of the term ''instrumental." In all
authorized versions of instrumentalism the term refers to the instru-
mental character of reflective, inferential consciousness. In the
misconceptions it is made to apply to all consciousness with the
result that immediate experience to which reflection is instrumental
is reduced to mere physical motion, and when applied to values the
misconceptions result in the absurdity, which the perpetrator of the
misconstruction delights to point out, of making all values instru-
mental to a process which is devoid of value.
References to repeated explicit statements by instrumentalists of
what they mean by * ' immediate experience ' ' show how unwarranted
this misuse of the term instrumental is and how grotesque the notion
that instrumentalism has no place for the values of appreciation,
contemplation and adoration which are precisely the things to which,
in instrumental doctrine, reflective consciousness is instrumental.
Some of the sources of the misconceptions are : (1) The term
"instrumentalism" which as an "ism" is, with some justification,
taken to mean a universal character; (2) the habit common to all
of us of thinking and talking of consciousness in cognitive terms; (3)
failure to note that the biology to which instrumentalists appeal is
a glorified biology loaded with all the conscious values social, aes-
thetic and religious of which it is stripped by those who find it a
stumbling-block ; (4) the confusion of the question of the nature and
function of reflective consciousness with the irrelevant psychological
matter of the division and specialization of interest.
A Sociological Theory of Knowledge: E. L. SCHAUB.
Though presenting itself as integral, experience likewise mani-
fests perplexing antitheses, both in fact and in worth, in the realm of
cognition no less than in those of feeling and volition. Hence dis-
tinctions such as those of opinion and knowledge, perception and
conception, sense data and categories.
I. Historical Setting. Early empiricism and rationalism were
.succeeded by Kant's endeavor to show that the various factors of
experience must be interpreted as abstractions from a concrete whole,
not as separate entities. This led to idealistic theories of knowledge,
for which experience is an indissoluble synthesis of existence and
meaning. But Kant inextricably combines with the above an at-
tempt to show how experience comes into being. This paved the
way for genetic doctrines: empiricism; apriorism; Spencer's media-
320 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
tory view; James's explanation of classificatory, logical and mathe-
matical relations as due to spontaneous variations; Bergson's evo-
lutionary apriorism. To safeguard the unique and authoritative
character of concepts and categories (as emphasized by apriorism)
while yet tracing them to specific origins verifiable by scientific
investigation (as attempted by empiricism) is the aim of Durkheim.
II. Durkheim' 's Theory of Knowledge. Cognitive experience
exhibits two mutually irreducible sorts of elements: (1) Sensations,
images and general ideas, dependent upon the organism and char-
acterized by flux, subjectivity, and a status merely of fact, not of
right. (2) Concepts, and the most general of the concepts, cate-
gories, the permanent to which the variable is related in the act of
thinking; characterized by immutability, impersonality, universal-
ity, communicability, and authoritativeness. Their origin is the col-
lective mind, which is distinct from individual minds and is sui
generis. The genesis of the concepts or categories of class, of the
hierarchical mode of classification, of totality, space, time, force,
cause, and contradiction.
Concepts and categories afford the first intuition of a realm of
truth an order characterized by impersonality, stability, and social
acceptance. No category or system of concepts more than approxi-
mates to objective validity; yet all are more than merely individual
and many are more than merely instrumental or even social in the
narrow sense of the term.
III. Critique. The difficulties center about the cleavage be-
tween the individual and the collective minds and about the intel-
lectualism which regards minds as consisting of representations.
Inadequate recognition of the social and logical aspects of sense per-
ception and of other processes classed as individual ; of the extent to
which concepts and categories are rooted in instincts; of difficulties
involved in the fact that, as compared with social organization, cate-
gories are practically, if not absolutely, stable, and connected with
the further fact that classification seldom occurs in connection with
the realm of spirits and of the beyond in spite of the fact that these
are matters of focal significance to the primitive mind. Contradic-
tion between Durkheim 's method and his principles. The categories
of his description presuppose the categories. Given (1) the charac-
teristics now conceded by numerous psychologists as original, (2) a
high degree of plasticity on the part of human nature, and (3) inter-
relationships with minds as well as with inert objects, and one may
account satisfactorily for the rational experience which individuals
come to enjoy. Epistemology should take into consideration the re-
lation of mind to mind along with that of mind to its objects.
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 321
The Chief Assumptions of Democracy: R. W. SELLARS.
It is not difficult nowadays to pick up books and essays very
critical of democracy. In these criticisms we clearly find the swing
of the pendulum from a naive romanticism which filled the demo-
cratic movement in its early days. But what we need to-day is an
effective idealism which is full of knowledge of actual conditions and
social forces.
In its deepest sense, democracy signifies the conviction that every
human being deserves respect and consideration. This respect is the
ferment which democracy introduces into society. In religious lan-
guage, the postulate of democracy is, that all men are brethren and
that God is the common father. The eighteenth century proclaimed
its democratic perceptions in the doctrine of inalienable rights.
But these guiding ideas have been largely individualistic. What
have been the actual principles at work in our institutional life?
First of all, we must remember that the democratic movement is the
social reality. And the democratic movement has faced in two di-
rections. It has denied the type of social organization previously
dominant and it has suggested principles of its own. Besides there
has always been a right and a left wing to the movement. We, in
America, have been far more familiar with the right, liberal wing
than with the left, radical wing.
The three important aspects of society are the political, the eco-
nomic and the social. In each of these dimensions the assumptions
of society have varied far more than we ordinarily realize. The first
attitude of democracy was individualistic and defensive. It stressed
rights rather than creation. It was not very constructive or forward-
looking. This comes out in such phrases as the "consent of the
governed" and "individual rights." In the economic sphere, we
have laissez-faire rather than group-planning. In social affairs, imi-
tation and convention rather than activity and independence of
spirit.
A new spirit seems now abroad, and democracy is more aware of
actual conditions and more purposive. The good life is the goal being
set, and the social conditions favoring its approximation are being
carefully scrutinized. It is clear, then, that the assumptions of de-
mocracy change radically from age to age.
The Ethical Import of Nationalism: E. L. HINMAN.
Recognizing the force of nationalism in modern days, the ques-
tion presses concerning its philosophical interpretation. Urged that
one's definition of the essence of nationalism will depend upon his
philosophy ; that nationalism as conceived in the context of a realistic
philosophy is a terrific force for evil, but that as leavened by the
322 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
spirit of a broad idealism it is one of the most valuable of constructive
influences. This influence should be seized upon and guided by the
representatives of philosophy. But it has been exploited hitherto
chiefly by the historians, whose discernment of the vital ideals of
civilization has been inadequate. And the result has been tragic.
Analysis of Professor Kamsay Muir's conception. Inadequate
tends to level downwards. Prevalence of cruder and more realistic
elements in popular nationalism and jingoism. Relevancy of stric-
tures by Veblen and Krehbiel. But these outrage nationalism rather
than interpret it. Must engage with and express higher idealism of
nationalistic consciousness. Study of Mazzini, as pointing the way
to this service.
The Concept of State Power: G. H. SABINE.
The state has traditionally been conceived for juristic purposes
as a unified power, or legal personality, having underived, and pos-
sibly unlimited, right to issue commands to its subjects or political
inferiors. Such commands of a political superior are law, and law
derives its binding force from the political superiority of the will
which issues it.
This conception is derived historically from the political condi-
tions which prevailed in the period which brought the state into
existence. The state was created by the rise of royal power to a
position of dominance over the feudal nobility or certain corpora-
tions within the kingdom and of independence as against the Church
and the Holy Roman Empire. Sovereign power meant in the first
instance the personal power of the king to make and enforce law
against all persons or associations within his domain. Such power
was not incorrectly described as underived, unified, and absolute.
The rise of constitutional monarchy brought into being the doc-
trine that this absolute power inheres not in the king, but in the
people, but the principle that absolute power is the source of law
remained unchanged. But the concept now lacked juristic clarity
because the people are not an organized law-making institution.
With the growth of constitutional limitations, the law-making power
of the state ceased to be concentrated in any specific agency of the
government and the attempts of political science to indicate the
body in which sovereign power resides were futile. The federal
states presented especially complex examples of political organiza-
tion. The rationalistic method of political science, however, clung to
the belief that certain essential powers of the state might be derived
by a logical elaboration of the concept of the state's power, and the
political tendency toward centralization of authority strengthened
this belief.
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 323
In fact, however, political practise does not justify the theory
that any specific powers are essential to the state nor is there much
unity in the powers which a given state exercises. Modern states
have taken over a varied assortment of activities having no obvious
unity beyond the fact that they are carried on by agencies of gov-
ernment. Moreover, the powers exercised by the state do not repre-
sent any specific public interest, since public interest may be just as
strong in many activities 'Conducted by private agencies. It is a
question of policy whether a socially important activity can best be
conducted by the one means or the other. In either case, however,
the activity is protected and regulated by law.
The prevailing tendency of constitutional government has been
to make every agency of government subject to law and with some
exceptions such agencies are legally responsible for their actions as
fully as private persons or corporations. This indicates the complete
inappropriateness of defining law as the will of the state embodied
in commands to political inferiors.
International Punishment : A. P. BROGAN.
There is an almost unworked field in the study of international
punishment. The task of philosophy here is to formulate the meth-
ods, principles, and rules for the determination of justice in the
punishment of nations.
This study should not be condemned as self-contradictory on the
argument that punishment originally occurs only within one group.
Men are now seeking for just ways of dealing with wrong-doing
between nations. This is our problem, call it what you will.
If philosophy is to be helpful for this problem, it must be philos-
ophy as the study of values rather than as metaphysics or epistemol-
ogy or theology. Discussions about determinism, about the general
will, about the absolute, would not benefit our problem even if agree-
ment could be reached ; and agreement can not be reached.
What we need is a common platform for ethical investigation.
The essentials of this platform (teleology, universalism, meliorism,
and experimentalism) could quickly be secured by serious coopera-
tion. The questions about which thinkers are likely to remain in
essential disagreement are those parts of ethical theory not necessary
as foundations for our study.
On this common platform a theory of international ethics must
be elaborated, as the guide and standard for international law and
for international associations. A principal part of this ethics will
be the justice of international punishment.
The determination of right and justice in this connection is a
324 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
problem for the student of ethical philosophy. But it would be folly
for the philosopher to pretend to deal with the entire problem of
international punishment. There is need of specialization on the
part of the philosopher, and there is equal need of cooperation with
the students of law, government, history, social psychology, and
similar fields. The task of the philosopher is to study the values
involved.
A Neglected Aspect of Hume's Ethical Theory: F. C. SHARP.
Hume finds the source of the moral judgment in the affective
side of man's nature. The ethicists of the rationalistic school have
always asserted that the logical consequence of such a view is ethical
subjectivism. Many of the members of the affectivistic school, such
as A. E. Taylor and Westermarck, freely admit the truth of this
contention.
The paper attempts to show how Hume, in defending his theory
against certain objections (which, however, had nothing to do with
subjectivism) was led to recognize that the moral judgment is some-
thing more than an expression of the passing feelings of the moment.
The moral judgment, he saw, does not represent the feelings aroused
in me by the fact that one of the parties of the situation happens to
be an acquaintance, a friend, or myself ; that I happen to have wit-
nessed the incident, or that the incident took place yesterday instead
of two thousand years ago. The moral judgment represents my feel-
ings with regard to conduct when I have abstracted from my acci-
dental relations to the parties concerned; it is the voice of the im-
personal or (somewhat less accurately) the impartial spectator.
When this fact is recognized, the distinction made in every-day
life between "correct" and "incorrect" moral judgments is at once
justified. For judgments in which I do not succeed in taking the
impersonal attitude are not moral judgments in the proper sense of
the term, and can therefore only be called "incorrect," or, better,
invalid. Hume never really saw the bearing o'f these facts upon the
general problem of the existence of a universally valid moral code.
The great majority of later ethicists have ignored the facts them-
selves completely. They are, however, of the first importance in
discussing the question: What are the causes of the variations in
moral judgments? Such a discussion may perhaps lead to the con-
clusion that when these invalid members are removed from the
system of our moral judgments the remainder will form a single
harmonious code which will thus represent the code of the entire
race. If so we shall have an ethical theory based upon desires and
their attendant feelings which is justified in asserting the existence
of a moral code valid for mankind as a whole.
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 325
A Reversal of Perspective in Ethical Theory: H. W. STUART.
(To be published in full in an early number of the Philosophical
Review.)
The Basis of Human Association: H. W. WRIGHT. 2
The basis of human association is personal communication car-
ried on through discussion, cooperation and emotional concord. Dis-
cussion is made possible by the fact that the ends which men choose
among are commonly intelligible. An end is a permanent possibility
of realization for a subject or self; such a self is essentially social,
for it maintains its personal identity by opposing to the shifting
play of animal sentience an order of definable objects that is as-
sumed to be real for all other selves as well. Cooperation depends
upon the fact that the satisfaction which human individuals seek
from the realization of objects as ends is a function of their compre-
hensiveness, and this, since it is based upon their intelligible char-
acter, is assumed to hold for all men equally. The possibility of an
agreement in purpose among men is therefore created, an agreement
which is favored by the fact that the more comprehensive ends are
those which include in their scope the interests of others as well as
the self. Emotional concord is made possible by the fact that the
feelings which accompany and result from human action spring
from the pursuit of commonly intelligible ends concerning whose
value there is general agreement. The "Kingdom of Ends" is by
nature a social kingdom ; the single self in pursuit of an intelligently
considered and deliberately chosen end involves the society of selves
participating in the realization of common ends. Personal com-
munication as a process has three essential characteristics : first, it is
governed by ends that are social and imply the community of selves ;
second, it gives fullest opportunity for the exercise of individual
initiative and inventiveness in the attainment of ends whose value
is generally appreciated; and third, it insures from the intercourse
of free persons the discovery of new values in the discharge of our
common social task.
Group Participation as the Sociological Principle par Excellence:
J. E. BOODIN.
It has been customary to explain social evolution and social con-
duct in terms of certain factors or causes, such as the physical fac-
tors, race, instinct, population, custom, etc. The thesis of this paper
is a reversal of the ordinary method. It is, that instead of trying to
account for the group by certain factors, we must understand the
2 To be published in full in a later issue of this JOURNAL.
326 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
factors in terms of the group its cumulative tradition and creative
life. The real causes or motives must be found in the life history of
the individual, as woven into the social network of relations at a
specific cross-section of the history of the group. We can not say
that this particular condition of the environment or this particular
tendency effected such and such results, but we must take account of
this condition or tendency as part of an organization of life interests
with its social pressure, system of beliefs and scale of values. The
particular factors must be regarded as instruments, conditions, raw
material for social construction. The process, in other words, must
be regarded, not as a mechanical but as a teleological process the
factors having meaning and efficiency only as they enter into the
creative synthesis of group realization. We must take account of
group participation, not as a mere effect, but as an independent
variable, and for sociology the most significant variable. We find
that other factors may vary and yet group relations remain the
same. And on the other hand we find that group relations may vary
while other factors remain the same.
EDWARD L. SCHAUB.
NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY.
REVIEWS AND ABSTRACTS OF LITERATURE
An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge. A.
N. WHITEHEAD. Cambridge University Press. 1919. Pp.
xii -f 200.
This is a book of real importance, but it is not a book for every-
body. There are pages filled with definitions of queer technical
terms, and there is no index, but that is not what makes it hard
reading. The difficulty lies in the thought. You need some mathe-
matical training to read the book, and you need some acquaintance
with the previous writings of the author, or the related writings of
Mr. Bertrand Russell. But far more than these, you need a sense
of the whole movement of modern physical science, and an imagina-
tion undaunted by four-dimensional manifolds interweaving with
other four-dimensional manifolds. In short, we have a book here
which ought to be read by every philosophy student interested in
metaphysics or in the philosophy of nature, but a book which most
students of philosophy are not competent to read.
The subject of the enquiry is stated to be ''geometry as a phys-
ical science," or "how is space rooted in experience?" And its
fundamental thesis is that the verifiable data of physical science
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 327
extend temporally as well as spatially. All nature can, and indeed
must, be analyzed into a complex of time-filling and space-filling
events. It is therefore assumed that certain so-called "mathe-
matical" objects, such as points of space and instants of time, do
not exist. Or rather, proof is advanced that we can get along with-
out assuming that they exist, and can still have a mathematics
applicable to nature. Professor Whitehead does not argue that
points and instants are unperceivable and therefore unreal. His
argument takes the more effective form of establishing that points
and instants are introduced only in a certain type of analysis of
nature, which analysis is then shown to be inadequate. "We can
not express the facts of nature as an aggregate of individual facts
at points and at instants" (p. 24). Thus it happens that no addi-
tion of points together will produce a length; if you start with
points, lengths must be introduced as something additional. But
you could get the equivalent of points out of lengths by a suitable
construction in the reverse direction.
The method of avoiding the assumption of points and instants is
not so much debated in the present book, as it is assumed to be valid
and then developed; the discussions which occur here of this
"method of extensive abstraction" are concerned with the details of
technique. The method consists essentially in taking the class of all
the space-time volumes that would include a certain supposed point
at an instant, and do not all include any other point or instant, ar-
ranging these in approximation series that are mutually equivalent
in that they all, as they grow smaller and smaller, approximate
towards the supposed point, and then taking the set of such equiva-
lent series as a substitute for the supposed instantaneous point. It
is somewhat as if, to use an over-simplified example, one took the
series of all circles having their center-point in common as being an
equivalent for the center itself. One would then translate geom-
etry into a form that omitted the mention of points : instead of say-
ing "the line passes through this point," one would say "the line
cuts all these circular areas." Each circle has a finite area; the
center-point has no finite area. But there is a unique one-one re-
lation between the set of circles- and their common center. So we
can employ a class of areas as a sort of substitute for the non-area
which is their limit; and thus simplify metaphysically, by being
able to say that all space-things have areas. But of course, in the
ways in which these space-things are put together there is a great
increase of complexity, especially since lines and areas must next be
translated into sets of volumes, and so on. Our motive here is ob-
viously not a pragmatic search for economy of thought, but a meta-
328 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
physical ideal of economy of assumption, as regards the introduction
of new sorts of irreducible metaphysical entities.
Professor Whitehead calls attention to an analogy with the dif-
ferential calculus. There is no physical meaning to a velocity at an
instant. Yet we can study the average velocity over three seconds,
over two seconds, over one second, over half a second, etc., and we
can then infer that, at the instant, a certain number would repre-
sent with great precision the velocity of the body at that instant.
The number is more precise than the values of the separate mem-
bers of the series from which it came, since the velocity for a second
is often only an average of various velocities during parts of the
second. Yet the velocity at an instant is, nevertheless, no velocity
at all; a perfectly instantaneous photograph would not show the
body in motion. The formerly employed explanation was that the
velocity in question was over an infinitesimal time ; and then we had
metaphysical problems about what were these "ghosts of vanished
quantities." But there are no infinitesimals. The "velocity at an
instant" is not a velocity, though it is the limit of a series of veloci-
ties over diminishing finite times. We could use the set of all such
series, equivalent in that they are all diminishing towards the same
instant, as the "velocity at the instant," but since they all have the
same number which is their limit as series, this number, though lying
outside of each and all these equivalent series, may be used as
answering the same purpose, when we are calculating the course of
behavior of a body. That is to say, the numbers have among them
one number which is the limit of the series of numbers representing
the velocities, though the velocities themselves do not have a limit
which is a velocity. If we were dealing with velocities in the con-
crete, the only equivalent we could give for a velocity at an instant
would be the entire set of series of actual velocities approximating
to it. This is what we have to do when analogously we seek existent
substitutes for non-existent "mathematical" points.
Certain difficulties seem still to lurk in the method. For in-
stance, the approximation series must be infinite. In our series of
concentric circles there is no circle that does not have within it a
still smaller circle. But an actual infinite is no less inexperienceable,
unverifiable, than is a mathematical point. There is something here,
in any case, that can be reached only by thought. Moreover, in the
present discussion at least, the areas and volumes seem to be assumed
to be sharply bounded, without that penumbra of vagueness which
blurs the outlines of every experienced figure. When we recall that
such a penumbra of vagueness must itself have indefinite boundaries,
and so on, then w/e see that, no matter how we handle these figures,
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 329
we use a thought that far outruns the verifiable. How complicated
does the equality of two lengths become, when neither length begins
or ends in a point ! Wonderfully ingenious this theory will have to
be till we begin to wonder whether the game is not being made
endlessly intricate for no deeper reason than to show the skill of
the player?
But there are other topics in Professor Whitehead's book, and
we can not exhaust any one of them here. Perhaps the most
central discussion is one concerning the contrast of events and ob-
jects. What relation does the analysis of the world into a stream
of events have to the ordinary analysis into objects, whether per-
ceived physical things, such as houses and trees, or scientific objects,
such as electrons? The answer is naturally complex. The two
sorts of analysis overlap, yet neither is exhaustive. Let us first
quote some relevant passages. "Events are essentially elements of
actuality" (p. 61) ; they "can never happen again;" "events never
change," though they give place to other events; "the irrevocable-
ness of the past is the unchangeability of events. ' ' The most funda-
mental relation among events is that of inclusion-exclusion, or part-
whole. Objects, on the contrary, do happen again; they reappear;
they are correlated with the physical act of recognition. Indeed,
Professor Whitehead concludes that they are not so much permanent
in time as out of time altogether. What is in time is the set of
events correlated with a given object. Yet also, thougih objects are
out of time and space, they are, nevertheless that which has possi-
bilities, that is to say, has potentialities. "Whenever the concept
of possibility can apply to a natural element, that element is an
object" (p. 64). As regards part-whole relations, "it is an error
to ascribe parts to objects," either temporal, as if the table today
were part of the total table, the table to-morrow another part; or
spatial, as if the leg of the table were part of the table. The having
spatial and temporal parts is peculiar to events. "Time and space,
which are entirely actual and devoid of any tincture of possibility,
are to be sought for among the relations of events." "The chief
confusion between objects and events is conveyed in the prejudice
that an object can only be in one place at a time. That is a funda-
mental property of events" (p. 65). "The continuity of nature
is to be found in events, the atomic properties of nature reside in
objects" (p. 66).
The term "event" lays emphasis on the time-covering character
of the actually existent. Nevertheless, this tapestry of events,
stretching away into past and future, absolutely actual, related only
by relations of inclusion-exclusion, is almost the antithesis of tern-
330 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
porality. Physicists and philosophers are alike in their deep-seated
desire to view the world ' ' under the aspect of eternity. ' ' Professor
Whitehead has tried to avoid such a tendency by making references
to action and creative advance. But somehow the creative flow of
the present becomes superficial in the course of the analysis, be-
comes a chance shadow that flits across the fixed tapestry of events.
As physicist you abstract; true enough, but Professor Whitehead 's
own inquiry is precisely this, How may we bring physics into closer
contact with natural fact? Now any easy device of letting time
slip out of the picture is not masterly; and time includes not merely
temporal extensity, but also the actuality of change. Perchance we
philosophers pride ourselves on eternity because we can not bring
our feeble minds to think squarely and heartily in terms of time, in
terms of this treacherous, ever-slipping ever-advancing movement,
that seems the very stuff out of which our lives are made; can not
bring ourselves to think in terms of potentialities, of possible occur-
rences and things unborn, of hopes and uncertainties and the open
road. "To realize the unimportance of time," says Mr. Bertrand
Russell, "is the gate of wisdom." Yes, of a certain moral wisdom,
perhaps; but why these moral judgments introduced into the con-
sideration of the world as it seems to be ? Even M. Bergson, with
all his lip-service to change, turns for the essence of mind to
memory, to memory which gives us the now silent panorama of the
past; and for his ideal of God, to an ideal Vision, which like Pro-
fessor Royce's Absolute., might command all time at once, in one
world-inclusive moment. Let us not attribute this tendency to the
nature of intellect, or to the spatializing of time. No, these are at
most only symptoms. The fault, if it be a fault, lies in our fear
and bewilderment before this dizzy, whirling, vanishing world as it is.
There is a clarifying virtue in the very sharpness of Professor
"Whitehead 's distinctions between the world as a set of events, and
the same world as various different sets of things, making no one
analysis exhaustive of all aspects, and apportioning certain concepts
to one analysis, certain to another. This is true, even though the
distinctions first made may not prove finally tenable. The appor-
tioning of time to events and timelessness to things is a case in
point. So also is it with the ascription of possibility to things. It
would be better perhaps, though more commonplace and hence less
suggestive, to have said that the temporal characters prominent in
things are different from the temporal characters prominent in
events, though things be considered as merely certain systems of
events. It would be better to say that you can talk, in one sense,
of a possible event, but not of an event's having possibilities, for
only things have potentialities. Since we recognize a thing, an ob-
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 331
ject, as the same in new situations, it has, in this respect, characters
similar to universals. So it becomes easy to generalize, and say of
things what we ordinarily say of universals, that they are timeless
and have no parts. But perhaps it would be better not to stretch
the analogy too far. Professor Whitehead's paradoxes are largely t
verbal, and behind them lie some really significant distinctions, dis- 1
tinctions which it would be a pity to lose in any verbal quarrel or '
novel convention about language usages.
One of the most baffling problems of distinguishing between the
verbal or conventional and the real is presented by the recent
scientific theory of relativity. Professor Whitehead's entire work
has been at every step influenced by these theories, and his own
specific discussions of Einstein and of the curious arbitrariness of
selecting light signals as the basic way of determining simultaneities,
are among the best philosophical criticisms of relativity that have
yet appeared. Professor Whitehead does not discuss the generalized
relativity theory, but introduces in his own geometry Euclidean and
continuity postulates. Also ho does not make it clear, any more
than does Einstein himself, precisely how the famous Newtonian
argument for absolute space, from the phenomena of rotation, is
answered by the relativist.
Professor Whitehead's own analysis would apparently and nat-
urally lead him though here we depart somewhat from his specific
statements and deal with what seem to be unnoted implications to
a distinction between the space of events and the space of things
or rather, spaces of things, for not only are there various sorts of
objects, but confining ourselves, for the moment, to ordinary phys-
ical objects, there are, if we consider space to be nothing but a
relation between objects, different spaces for different sets of objects,
as Professor Whitehead himself remarks, and an object which is
standing still in one space is moving in another. Apparently, the
space of events, or space-time of events, is one aspect of the events
themselves, namely their extensity. According to Professor White-
head, it constitutes an all-inclusive plenum, and if we limit ourselves
strictly to events, the only possible geometry would seem to be a sort
of "analysis situs" of inclusion-exclusion, curiously reminiscent of
Aristotle's long-neglected theory that space is essentially a relation-
ship of container and contained. It would seem, however, that
without introducing objects, this space-time of events could not have
any metrical properties, such as lengths. Fixity of units of length
would involve recognition of sameness. The event-manifold is a
"jelly-fish world," where no units are suggested, for there are no
rigid bodies. But neither would there be simultaneity of remote
events. The supposition that there would be simultaneity, and
332 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
hence "moments of time," is apparently tacitly introduced -by Pro-
fessor Whitehead. Yet the interconnection of simultaneity and
units of length is one of the most central theses of the theory of
relativity. The metrical structure is something new, independent,
external, laid down over the manifold of events and fitting it some-
what loosely.
The Bergsonians inform us that needs of action have impelled
us to try to fixate the fluidity of events by superimposing rigid math-
ematical forms. The situation seems nowadays almost the reverse:
we are trying to measure given extensities with india-rubber yard-
sticks. These yardsticks are still comparable, since they vary ac-
cording to law ; but the law is their own law, and not one necessitated
by the events to be measured. I measure a moving train, and dis-
cover it has "become shorter" as it moved. The passenger on the
train replies that the train is just as it has always been, the dis-
crepancy originated through my laying my measuring-tape on the
front end of the train just a moment 'before I laid it on the back.
Simultaneity and length are thus curiously interwoven by the rela-
tivity theory, but both are relative and comparative, and are super-
imposed on an extensity which is somehow absolute. A man in Wash-
ington, D. C., may quarrel over the telephone with a man in St.
Louis, one declaring it is eleven o'clock, and the other that it is ten
o'clock. Obviously, they are quarreling about the same time, and
their quarrel is a verbal one concerning what name they are going
to call "it" by. But the verbal quarrel is not purely verbal; it is
based on a difference, not in the identity of the moment of time
under dispute, but in the standard of comparison. Just so, the
train has a certain absolute extensity. Otherwise there would be no
question raised. But the instant there is an attempt to compare this
extensity with other extensities, we have a difference of standards of
comparison on our hands. There is not merely the obvious arbi-
trariness due to conventionality in selecting a particular yardstick;
and not merely an idealization which creates for us a perfect "un-
changing" Dr. Jekyll of a yardstick, despite the Mr. Hyde char-
acteristics of actual physical yardsticks, infected as they are with
what Professor Whitehead calls the "incurable vagueness" of all
physical objects, plus some additional faults peculiar to yardsticks;
but in addition, the very process of measuring involves new compli-
cations, so that there is more than one result possible even where
you measure the same thing with the same yardstick. Would we
could be naive again, like the Bergsonians, and make a simple and
rigid mathematics after our own wishes, instead of this Franken-
stein's monster of a mathematics, that grows exuberant according
to a will of its own !
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 333
Let us not 'be misled into supposing that mathematics is really
growing less rigorous. Let us recognize the stern and stubborn
precision of these novel mathematical-physical theories. But let us
recognize that the mathematics popular among philosophers seems
on the verge of joining other primitive mythologies. Philosophers
tell us that Spinoza, for instance, tried to put his philosophy into
mathematical form, with evident axioms and certain deductions.
But the mathematical logicians have shown that self -evidently true
axioms are no part of mathematics, and more than that, that the
whole deductive-system-form is a device of exposition rather than
the essence of mathematics. Philosophers have expatiated on the
perfect simplicity of the "mathematical objects," these being num-
bers, or triangles, or mathematical points. But under Mr. Russell's
analysis that Platonic world of numbers has disappeared ; and now,
under Professor Whitehead's analysis, the mathematical points and
triangles are disappearing. Mathematics, bereft of everything that
made it mathematics in the eyes of the philosophers, from axioms to
infinitesimals, from triangles with angles necessarily equal to two
right angles, and pairs of straight lines that can not enclose a space,
to the contradictions of infinity and the independence of applied
geometry from the empirical arrangements of matter bereft of all
these, mathematics goes on, greater and more triumphant than ever.
"When predictions based on a new use of non-Euclidean geometry
recently made it possible for the first time to compare non-Euclidean
and Euclidean geometry as applied to physical space, and Euclid
lost, then even the man in the street heard something hadl happened,
and was perplexed to understand it from the expositions given by
our good professors of mathematics and astronomy, who had them-
selves been caught napping, expositions about as intelligible in most
cases as the shout of the newsboys calling an extra. Everyone knew
something had happened, but neither philosophers nor physicists
were sure just what it was. They had suddenly been brought face
to face with the startling possibility that those eccentric speculations
on non-Euclidean geometries and the foundations of mathematics
might somehow or other become tlhe gateway to the science of the
future, and the prospect was bewildering. Perchance some of them
will now even try to read Mr. Whitehead's book and we fear they
will fail!
Professor Whitehead's book covers two hundred pages of big
print. A really adequate review of the book would possibly occupy
four hundred pages. Professor Whitehead has raised more ques-
tions than he has settled, felt the existence of problems he has
not thought out. He has crowded into the closing chapters sug-
gestions enough for another book suggestions about causes and
334 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
about the relation of geometrical figures to sense, and about rhythms,
including those queer rhythmic temporal structures called by the
general name, "life." The present review might attempt to give
neat little summaries of these, but we shall not. For then we should
probably leave out the most valuable aspect of the discussion, its
suggestiveness ; and some reader of this review might suppose he.
knew the contents of Whitehead's book without reading it, and so
continue to live in ignorance and self -approbation. If Professor
Whitehead ever comes to perfect clearness about all the topics raised
in this book, he will write another book that will be one of the
great masterpieces of modern philosophy.
H, T. COSTELLO.
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY.
Free Trade, the Tariff, and Reciprocity. F. W. TAUSSIG. New
York: The Macmillan Co. 1920. Pp. ix-f 219.
Professor Taussig, the former chairman of the United States
Tariff Commission, has in this book gathered together a number of
addresses and papers dealing with various aspects of the tariff con-
troversy. The volume is characterized by more of unity than
usually attaches to such a collection, and the reader will find in it
a coherent, consistent presentation of the author's views on the
main issues of the tariff question.
Mr. Taussig states his position in the opening essay. "The
essence of the doctrine of free trade is that prima facie inter-
national trade brings a gain, and that restrictions on it presumably
bring a loss. Departures from this principle, though by no means
impossible of justification, need to prove their case, and if made in
view of the pressure of opposing principles they are matter for
regret. In this sense the doctrine of free trade, however widely
rejected in the world of politics, holds its own in the sphere of the
intellect" (p. 33). With force and clarity Mr. Taussig develops this
thesis. In the course of his discussion he disposes of many of the
popular fallacies concerning the advantages of protection which,
many times refuted, still remain in circulation. Most illuminating
is his treatment of ' ' How tariffs should not be made, ' ' in which cer-
tain intimate and interesting details of tariff -making are revealed.
The final essay in the collection deals with the situation to be
faced by the United States with the conclusion of peace. In a time
marked by the uncertainties and confusions which characterize
domestic conditions and foreign relations to-day, it is not surprising
to find the author chary of dogmatism as to the future course of
events. Upon the character of the ultimate peace depend the com-
mercial relations and economic policies of the great powers. And
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 335
Mr. Taussig, with a wisdom probably in part born of his Peace Com-
mission experience, refrains from prophecy as to what that final
settlement may be.
FREDERICK C. MILLS.
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY.
JOURNALS AND NEW BOOKS
THE PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW, November, 1919. The Na-
ture of the Community (pp. 547-561) : WILBUR M. URBAN.-' 'A de-
fense of philosophic orthodoxy." By orthodoxy is meant the over-
individual and monistic conception of the state. Views these two
conceptions from the critical standpoints of fact and value, and de-
fends a modified form of the orthodox conception. The Pluralistic
State (pp. 562-575) : HAROLD J. LASKi.-Advocates a pluralistic as
opposed to a monistic conception of the state. A monistic state is
"an hierarchial structure" with sovereignty spatially collected at the
center. But such a view, it is held, is administratively incomplete
and ethically inadequate. We are tending toward a partition of
power on the basis of function and toward the judging of state
actions by the same moral standards as any other actions. Com-
munity as a Process (pp. 576-588) : M. P. FoLLETT.-Views com-
munity as a creating and integrating process in which the social
process is patterned after Freudian psychology and the Bergsonian
conception of change as qualitative. Such a view modifies the monis-
tic conception of hierarchy, putting the inter-individual for the over-
individual mind, and also puts -unifying for the pluralist conception
of reduction to unity. The Community 1 and Economic Groups (pp.
589-597) : JAMES H. TUFTS -Notes examples of the conflict between
political and economic forces with brief sketch of the background of
present problems. Suggests three lines of reform : extension of po-
litical organization, syndicalism and "the giving of economic groups
considerable functions as committees," holding them to accountabil-
ity. Discussion: The New Rationalism and Objective Idealism:
MARY W. CALKINS, EDWARD G. SPAULDING. Dr. Strong and Quali-
tative Differences : MARGARET F. WASHBURN. Reviews of Books : W. R.
Sorley, Moral Values and the Idea of God, G. WATTS CUNNINGHAM.
J. W. Scott, Syndicalism and Philosophical Realism, W. P. MON-
TAGUE. J. S. Mackenzie, Outlines of Social Philosophy, WALTER G.
EVERETT. James Gibson, Locke's Theory of Knowledge and its His-
torical Relations, A. K. ROGERS. Notices of New Books. Notes.
PSYCHOLOGICAL BULLETIN, August, 1919. Articles: An
Experiment to Determine the Relation of Interests to Abilities (pp.
336 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
259-262) : R. HARTMAN and J. F. DASHIEL. - The present experiment
employed the method of ranking relative abilities and relative inter-
ests in six simple forms of psychological tests. Tests used: Word
Completion, Code Writing, Immediate Retention of Visual Impres-
sions, Arithmetic Problem, Pitching Pennies, Letter Cancellation.
The results are thought to have some significance in the light of two
considerations: (a) the indirectness of the method of calculating the
ranks in ability, and (&) the nature of the activities used, these being
mostly paper and pencil tests of the traditional type and presumably
not calculated to arouse as varied interests as would activities chosen
from wider fields. Tests of Discrimination and Multiple Choice for
Vocational Diagnosis (pp. 262-267) : DAGNY SuNNE.-The McComas
multiple choice experiment was given to disabled soldiers who had
also been given the army Alpha Test, the Pintner Cube Test, and the
Healy Picture Completion Test II. The coefficients show that the
Alpha test rating would have been unfair to some of the men if used
as the basis for selecting vocational courses. The Function of Psy-
chology in the Rehabilitation of Disabled Soldiers (pp. 267-290) :
BIRD T. BALDWIN. -A report of the work done at the Walter Reed
General Hospital, Takoma Park, D. C. General Reviews and Sum-
maries: Drugs: A. T. POFFENBERGER. A review of eleven references
on drugs. Reading: E. H. CAMERON. A review of the work of
Breed and Wembridge and Means. Reaction Time: V. A. C. HEN-
MON. A review of the work of Angell, Macht and Titchener. Spe-
cial Reviews: G. S. Hall, Jesus, the Christ, in the Light of Psychol-
ogy: E. S. AMES.
Mecklin, John M. An Introduction to Social Ethics: The Social
Conscience in a Democracy. New York: Harcourt, Brace &
Howe. 1920. Pp. ix -f 446.
NOTES AND NEWS
PROFESSOR JAMES H. TUFTS of the University of Chicago will
lecture at Columbia University for the academic year 1920-21. His
courses, as announced, include one on the History of American
Thought, one on Moral and Political Philosophy, and a seminar in
Ethical Theory.
Henry Holt & Co. announce for publication this month a new
book by Professor John Dewey, entitled Reconstruction in Philosophy,
based on the lectures which he delivered last year in Japan at the
University of Tokyo.
VOL. XVII, No. 13. JUNE 17, 1920
THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS
THE REALLY EEAL
IN the course of his criticism a recent reviewer remarks of a cer-
tain volume of poems, "No one will expect the life-blood of
realism in a book which blazons on its first page, 'Dedicated to Real-
ity.' ' The paradox may at first appear to result from the purely
adventitious coincidence in the name of an esthetic and a metaphys-
ical theory; yet there remains the haunting question: Is, then, the
reality which the artist seeks to represent in sensuous imagery en-
tirely distinct from the reality which the philosopher searches out
in the naked simplicity of reason ? Reality is a term so hallowed by
tradition and yet so ever vital in the realms of ideal society, of Sci-
ence, of Art, and of Religion ; there have been and there are to-day
so many men proudly boasting of their l ' realism ' ' and yet differing
so profoundly among themselves as to just what constitutes that
"reality" which claims their devotion, that one is tempted to marvel
at the vagaries of the human spirit, and to ask, with a vague sense of
disillusion reminiscent of an earlier inquirer, "What is reality?"
There is a sense, of course, in which this question becomes the
starting point of the philosophic quest, and to essay an answer
would mean the setting forth on that long and arduous pilgrimage.
Yet it is possible to ask the question in another mood, and to seek to
discover, not the distant goal, but the nature of that inward urge
which bids men seek it. One man returns and proclaims that he has
found reality at last ; that it is a wondrous land, a land passing the
comprehension of those dull souls who have been content never to
wander outside their own dooryards. Another comes back, after
weary seeking, to discover it at home amidst the flowers and birds of
his own garden. A third refuses to make any lengthy journey; he
marches straightway to his stable and pokes in his dung-heap, ex-
claiming, as the hideous crawling things are exposed writhing in the
sun, "Reality? Here alone is reality!" Another trods the well-
beaten path to the neighboring chapel, another wanders down a
lane with his beloved, still another searches in the slums of the great
337
338 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
pity. And all the while the master of the house and his guest are
seated at table, the one exclaiming, "Ah, but this is reality!" while
the other rejoins, "There is no reality! Bring up another bottle!"
There can be found, in fact, no place, however likely or unlikely, in
which some seeker has not discovered the goal of his search ; and all
unite in paying homage to it under the common title of "reality."
What, then, is this reality which beckons men on, yet never seems
the same; which claims their allegiance, yet forever eludes their
ken? Science is its comprehension, Art its expression, Religion its
worship ; it is the universal object of ideal society, and yet it is the
cause of all those dissensions which break up ideal society into hos-
tile and warring groups. Philosopher demolishes the system of his
brother philosopher, artist rips up the canvas of his fellow artist,
worshipper calls down the wrath of heaven upon his co-religionist,
and all invoke in their aid the same god, the same reality. It does
indeed appear as if a recent writer might be right when he said that
reality seemed to be having its little joke upon the realists.
It would be useless, by pointing out the errors of previous think-
ers and proclaiming another solution to the quest for the real, to
inject a new source of contention into this welter of confusion and
discord. Yet with realists on all hands in violent disagreement it is
perhaps profitable to consider, if not what reality is, still what it
means in human experience; what are its nature and function in
those realms of ideal society which crown the Life of Reason. In
the judgment, "This is real," with which the scientist refutes the
man of common sense, the Platonist the scientist, the art critic the
Platonist, and the statesman the art critic, what is it which these
men of differing interest mean by the term they so freely bandy
about ?
Primarily, of course, "real" is a term implying a certain on to-
logical status, and as such it contains a whole metaphysic of its own.
This has been developed in scholasticism, that philosophic system
whose rigid adherence to common sense notions has robbed it of the
delightful wonders of more startling and deliciously upsetting views.
There, "real" has been used as the adjective corresponding to
"being," and the ontological question has become one of distinc-
tions within being, of different kinds of reality. But this primary
and colorless definition has never satisfied more adventurous souls;
nor, in truth, has it exerted much influence among men at large.
Turn to any dictionary and read through the dozen odd definitions
there given of ' ' real ' ' ; and in every case you will find that it is not
an epithet descriptive of being in general, but rather a distinction
made within it. When a man exclaims, "This is real," especially if
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 339
he be so impressed as to make of his discovery the basis of an artistic
or a philosophic system, he means something very different indeed
than if he had merely remarked, "This is," or "This has being,"
and the difference lies precisely in the "this." That which is real
is, in common parlance as in more philosophical jargon, always set
over against and opposed to that which is not real, or less real, or not
"really" real. And, try as he may, the man who makes such a dis-
tinction can not refrain from a certain condescension, a certain pa-
tronizing air, toward that which he has assigned to a less exalted
seat in his pantheon of being.
It is this enlisting of personal preference in behalf of certain
ontological distinctions which makes the conflicting realisms so bitter
and uncompromising toward each other. An artist could, perhaps,
look with some measure of tolerance upon a brother artist who con-
fessed a personal delight in portraying certain types of experience ;
but when that second artist insists that he is a "realist," that he is
expressing things as they really are, he has committed the unpardon-
able sin, and no sarcasm is too biting to pour upon the miserable
miscreant who has committed the supreme artistic hybris. One can
accordingly fancy the thoughts in the mind of the framer of the
definition of realism in the Encyclopedia Britannica, when he asserts
that "the realist is he who deliberately declines to select his subjects
from the beautiful or harmonious, and, more especially, describes
ugly things and brings out details of an unsavory sort." Or one
can picture the pitying scorn of the poet who dedicated the volume
to Reality for the poor mortal who imagined a careful depicting of
the outward trappings of life could express what life really is. And,
on the other side, we know the contempt with which a political real-
ist like M. Clemenceau regards the vaporings of vague idealism
anent a league of nations and a world without wars. It is not so
much the fact that the enlightened prefer to worship the Devil that
matters ; it is that they maliciously call him God.
To say, tLen, that a certain class of objects is "real," always
implies that a distinction is being made; there is another comple-
mentary class which is not real. As Santayana remarks, man has an
innate idealizing tendency, and has always been prone to look beyond
the changing flux of immediate experience for something more per-
manent, something transcending the sense-world and its imperfec-
tions; and this something beyond, this realm of reason and not of
sense, has been for those who have gazed upon it the ontologically
fundamental, reality. In contradistinction to these Platonic spirits
there have always been those who insisted that the real was not that
which formed the object of mind, but rather the tangible and visible
340 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
objects which they met with in their daily experience. Protest and
counter protestation: these have been, again and again, the history
of man's spiritual adventures, and each new affirmation of reality
has been equally a denial of reality to that which some other group
has held dear.
So true is it that ' ' reality ' ' has been the name men have given to
certain phases of experience which appealed to them as being funda-
mental that it is quite possible to classify individuals on the basis of
what they hold to be real. A story is related of a man in a railway
compartment who offered to tell his companions' professions if they
would but answer a single question. He asked them, ''What is life ?"
and from their responses he was able to reveal their souls. An even
clearer insight could have been gained had the query run, "What
is real?" The Platonist, the Aristotelian, the artist with his vision
of perfection, the painter with his ' ' realistic ' ' portrait, the Utopian,
the stern Realpolitiker all would give away their secrets if they
truly answered so searching a question. And such a classification
would have many advantages over the arbitrary and artificial ones
philosophers are wont to employ. It might indeed prove that defi-
nitions of reality reveal less about the ultimate nature of the universe
than about their authors' souls.
For not only is * * real ' ' a distinction and an antithesis ; it is also
essentially a category of laudation and a judgment of value. A thing
is not real merely because it happens to be; it must fulfil other con-
ditions before it can be elevated to the supreme ontological rank. In
this respect "reality" differs radically from "existence." The
latter is a purely ontological category, to be awarded on the basis of
experimental evidence, but it conveys in itself no implication of
approbation. Indeed, there are those who, like Plato, regard a
thing 's existence as in some sense a degradation of its reality. Real-
ity is rather an attribute pertaining to certain values, an honorary
rank to which they are promoted; and as such, what values will be
accounted real naturally depends upon the criterion and standard
adopted by the realist. It is for this reason that what a man holds
to be real is such an excellent test of his spirit, for it is a test pri-
marily of his standards, his intellectual, moral, and artistic criteria.
Thus the logical realist fixes his gaze upon the chaste beauty of
immutable form, and, putting beneath him as unworthy all thoughts
of the kaleidoscopic flux of existence and the encroaching finger of
time, yearns to dwell forever in that eternal universe. To call such
pure forms "reality" is a judgment of value by no means attractive
to those with a deep love for the warmth and immediacy of concrete
experience, and we have men who, like James and Bergson, find real-
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 341
ity in the rich flow of life itself and disdainfully discard intellectual
forms as the mere slaves of the really real. Still others find no real-
ity in life ; for them it is to be discovered in objects and things, in
the discrete and pluralistic conglomeration of physical nature in
which they find themselves. The artist will indignantly reject the
photograph, with the curling lip, "That is not the real man, that is
but his corpse," and strive to express, in perchance some weird
drawing, his very soul ; while his fellow will bewail the idealizations
of the shallow throng, and paint the harlot at her blackest. No artist
can escape the necessity of making this selection and of depicting
reality according to his own judgment; even Zola, that arch apostle
of the mirror theory of art, was forced to define it as " a slice of na-
ture seen through a temperament. " Or if we turn to morals we dis-
cover the same evaluating tendency. The Kealpolitiker thinks in
terms of power and armies and economic forces because they are the
things which are valuable to attain his own ends ; hence they are the
realities of the situation, and he overlooks the importance of the
imponderables, as the shrewder Bismarck called them, because he is
in his nature so blunted that he is unable to reckon their value as
contributions toward his goal. The ethical dreamer is likewise led
by the supreme value he places on his vision of the perfect society
to slight the obstacles in the way of its practical attainment; they
do not constitute real problems for him because they are the bitter
dream, not the reality to come. And if we turn to the religious life,
we are met on one side with the proud boast, "I am a realist; I do
not bother about God. Of that hypothesis I have no need," and on
the other the mystic tells us, "God is the only reality; all other
things are worthless compared with the supernal joy of His pres-
ence. ' ' There is no part of the Life of Reason to which we can turn
to discover reality without having it duly impressed upon us that
.' ' reality " is a blend of fact and value, and that the determining ele-
ment is the value.
This merging of the field of fact and the field of value might well
invite censure did it obliterate a real distinction ; and it is undeniable
that man has had a tendency, not only to hypostatize his values, but
to confuse them with existence itself. One has but to turn to the
record of the subtler theological speculation of religious souls to
behold the ease with which the supreme values of divinity are
ascribed to the supreme physical power of the universe. This
identification, this inverted physics, as Santayana calls it, is indeed
a confusion of realms which, on the face of it, appears to have no
logical justification ; and it has bred in the past no end of trouble,
not only for the natural order, thus gratuitously endowed with moral
342 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
values to which it modestly made no claim (which might have been
expected), but even more for the realm of values itself. The identi-
fication of the good or the beautiful with the existent has given
birth to the problem of evil and the problem of ugliness; and the
latter, for a sensitive soul like Plato, might well assume the monu-
mental proportions of the former. This problem, when it has re-
ceived rational consideration, has inevitably resulted in the dulling
of the moral and the esthetic senses, and the subtle assimilation of
the value to the existence whose original purpose was merely to add
another jewel to the crown of the good and the beautiful.
But the merging of fact and value which every attribution of
reality exemplifies does not operate to obliterate such a distinction.
In it, value is not assimilated to existent fact, but rather is fact as-
similated to value ; and the sting is removed by the sharp distinction
usually preserved between reality and existence. In many cases,
to be sure, existence is taken as the basis of value, and hence indi-
rectly does become the reason for the attribution of reality ; but this,
far from proving that * ' real ' ' is not essentially a category of lauda-
tion, merely impugns the validity of the criterion of value sub-
scribed to by the particular realist. And one can not escape the con-
viction, after the salutary tragedy of the rise and fall of that empire
founded on "realistic" politics, that even when existence is con-
sciously assumed as the standard of value the practical outcome re-
veals other and less obvious bases of selection. On the other hand,
the ascription of reality to a certain class of objects, even when it
so far approaches existence as to imply a distinct power, means only
that such an object is capable of inspiring in him who has hypostatized
it demotion and emulation ; when it does partake of the nature of
cause, it is always as final and never as efficient cause that it operates.
The boundary between the ideal and the existent is kept clear and
distinct; the honorary appellation of "real" is, as it were, like one of
those Papal titles of nobility which elevate the holder without im-
posing upon him the burden of a seat in the House of Lords, and the
title remains equally a mark of honor whether the Pope bestows it
upon some obscure benefactor of the church or, as some Popes might
prefer, upon some proud British peer.
If, then, it may be regarded as established that "real" is a dis-
tinction made in experience on the basis of value, and that the con-
fusion noted in all the realms of ideal society springs from a varying
standard of value rather than from differences as to experimental
proof of precise ontological status, it must be admitted that much
light has been thrown upon the original question of the function of
reality in human experience. The quest of reality, which we found
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 343
,to be the goal of Science, of Art, and of Religion, and which we
found resulted in so much of disagreement and dissension, resolves
itself into the search for standards of value, not of existence ; and the
Life of Reason becomes just such a development and criticism of
values and criteria. It can not be expected that the artist will ever
allow a dispassionate examination of existence to determine for him
what is real, and that he will then abjure his former ways and de-
vote himself wholeheartedly to the expression in plastic medium of
that empirically verified reality. He might well retort that the mere
fact of the existence of such and such salient characteristics in na-
ture and in man was indeed interesting, but that it hardly touched
his art ; his task was to reflect man and his world, not as he seemed,
but as he really was, and that ''really" would let in again the whole
gamut of the artistic schools. Nor will either the Utopian or the
Realpolitiker accept the results of a future science of society as the
final arbiter of the exact nature of political life. Undisturbed by the
results of careful analysis, the former will continue striving to
realize the reality he has beheld in the sky, while the latter will con-
tinue to ignore those qualities in human nature which fail to min-
ister to his aims. And no searching of the heavens in vain with the
latest instrument of the astronomer will convince the religious soul
that he does not know the Living God. It is not by any description
.of existence that these opposed schools can ever be united as to what
is real. It is only by a reasoned criticism of values, and by the
carrying forward of a process of harmonization and adjustment in
the light of some higher standard, some greater and more inclusive
criterion, that men can hope to achieve some measure of, not, in
truth, agreement, but of tolerance and insight into each other's
hearts. Only then, out of the fullness of their ripened wisdom, can
they cooperate in the enjoyment of the rich symphony of those
values which are found to have their place in a well-rounded Life of
Reason.
And, specifically, this conclusion as to the function of reality has
a direct bearing upon the theories of those modern thinkers who have
arrogated to themselves the honor of being the only complete and
thoroughgoing realists, and find great difficulty in denying even to
the pathetic and orphaned round-square that reality which they so
generously bestow on all else that comes within their ken. To such
"neo-realistic" followers of Meinong ''real" has virtually ceased to
have a meaning ; they are concerned, not with drawing a distinction,
but with insisting that distinctions drawn by those who lovingly
bestowed reality upon their favorite objects have no validity, and
with reducing the whole universe, from the veriest raving of the
344 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
maniac to the existent rock, to precisely the same ontological status.
Between such men and idealists like Bradley, who likewise seek to
obliterate distinctions by denying reality to anything, even as they
.themselves affirm it of everything, there is little to choose ; except,
indeed, as the idealists restore what they have destroyed by their
saving doctrine of degrees of truth and reality. Such thinkers
identify "reality" with the colorless "being," and it is indeed pos-
sible to pursue such a course. But then it is necessary to introduce
once more, this time within reality, those very, distinctions which
have just been so laboriously smoothed over, and there hardly ap-
pears a sufficient reason for thus expunging from the philosophical
vocabulary a term of such time-honored service and such potent
appeal as "reality." Such -a procedure seems scarcely consonant
with that sharpening of critical powers and that increasing delicacy
of refinement upon which the hope of the development of more per-
fect standards and more harmonious adjustments of values seems
to rest.
The potency of * ' real, ' ' in fact, as a philosophical instrument, lies
precisely in its ability to gather into a single focus those varied
values which claim men's devotion and to free them of the meaning-
less accretions of existence. It is by this power of clarification that
it has revealed the path which has enabled men to advance toward
their chosen goals. This the present-day realists throw overboard,
preferring the fullness of vision which springs from an equal in-
sistence upon all the richly varied content of experience to that
singleness of aim and that peace of soul which come only with an
ordered arrangement of the generous gifts of life into a universe, a
universe at whose head stands a clearly envisaged reality.
In contradistinction to such an ordered achievement of reason the
universe of the new realists appears without vistas, without paths
leading to any particular goal. To some, indeed, the very super-
abundance with which it has been provided, the rich intricacy of its
interlacing structure, proves more of an impediment than an aid.
They feel choked, stifled, by the luxuriant tangle, and have a sense
of struggle against the bonds which tie them hand and foot and con-
strict the free movement of their limbs. When, for instance, one is
called, on looking upon an empty white canvas, to see there all the
pictures which have ever been painted, together with the infinitely
greater number of those which might have been, but have not yet
inspired the painter's brush, one's imagination is overwhelmed and
dulled, and one longs for the clear vision which will reveal, not such
a riot of confused forms, but the one picture which the urgings of
the soul impel the artist to set down, the real picture amidst all the
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 345
goblins and wraiths of a dead past and an unborn future. There is
an indescribably eery sensation resulting frpm the vivid realization
of such a universe, which, curiously enough, seems all ghost just
because all real, just because there are no high lights. The doctrine
of Bruno comes to mind, that where all is thus actual all is at the
same time potential, and one can not help feeling that somehow one
has left the sunlit paths where familiar things are what they seem
for a strange enchanted forest where in most disconcerting fashion
opposites merge into one. And one joyfully welcomes the ringing
challenge of Bertrand Russell that realism must preserve its dis-
tinctions. He at least recognizes the true meaning of reality, and
like some medieval mystic he proclaims that all experience is appear-
ance and mere sensibilia ; the world of reality is not what it seems,
but is motionless and frozen in its icy precision, yet bathed withal in
a wondrous light. One may not agree with him in overlooking man
jn his insignificance, but one can not help admiring the boldness
with which he deifies that which for him has supreme value. His is
not the lazy tolerance of an indifferent spirit; he has a new gospel
10 preach, and he is not afraid to condemn the idolatry of the pagan.
It behooves all searchers after reality, therefore, especially if
they claim to be realists, to remember that they are seeking to make
a distinction in experience, nay, to make the supreme distinction,
.that between what merely is and what is real. And it is well for
them to bear in mind, as they pursue this philosophic quest, whether
they be lovers of wisdom who would comprehend the real through
reason, or artists who would formulate it in plastic beauty, or states-
men who would lead mankind to a greater enjoyment of its fruits, or
religious souls who would simply fall down and worship it, that that
which is the object of their differing endeavor is essentially a value,
the Supreme Value, whose elaboration and further development lies
not in the mere discovery of fact or the delimitation of existence, but
in the harmonizing and synthesizing process of the Life of Reason.
J. HERMAN RANDALL, JR.
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY.
A NOTE ON THE RELATION OF PSYCHOLOGY TO
ANTHROPOLOGY
IN his recent address at St. Louis/ Dr. Ales Hrdlicka has made a
^candid attempt to resolve a vexed and complicated problem,
the problem of the mutual relations of anthropology and psychology.
No one who has followed the fortunes of that section of the American
Association for the Advancement of Science (Section H), which has
i Science, LI., 199-201, February 27, 1920.
346 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
included at least in its title these two subjects, need be told that
the relationship in question has been both ambiguous and vague.
The anthropologist's address has notably advanced the problem in
two ways : it has set forth certain fundamental difficulties and it has
redefined for us the province of anthropology.
What Dr. Hrdlicka has further sought is an acceptable defini-
tion of psychology; a definition which should promote clear under-
standing and allow an equitable partition of intermediate territory.
He first turned to "a series of the foremost representatives" of psy-
chology, for help which as he has to acknowledge "did not
materialize." Which psychologists were included in "the series"
the reader is not told. The anthropologist might have fared better
had he resorted directly to general treatises. In a similar inquiry
the present writer recently referred a score of intermediate students
to a dozen or more current works, citing by chapter and verse each
author's formal definition and asking each student to formulate his
own conception. The result was satisfactory beyond the writer's
anticipation. It brought to the laboratory .an intelligent and fairly
concurrent opinion regarding the object and the scope of psychology.
These twenty persons succeeded by critical scrutiny in extracting
from the books a decent if tentative working conception of the
subject. Apart from those writers whose chief concern lies, accord-
ing to their own frank admission, either in medicine, or in philos-
ophy, or in organic evolution, or solely in the performances (the
"behavior") of the physical organism (a sort of dynamic ecology),
the differences to be found are, for the most part, differences of
.emphasis. This statement accords with the conclusions reached in
the recent formulations of the committee on terminology of the
American Psychological Association. 2 The committee of five mem-
bers was charged "to consider the matter of uniformity of usage of
psychological terms." Its own definitions were submitted for re-
vision and extension to the members of the Association. As regards
psychology at large, the definition which finally proved to be most
acceptable to a majority of American psychologists runs as follows :
' ' Psychology is the science of mental phenomena. ' ' It appears from
the report of this committee that the only other formulation which
seriously competes with the foregoing places more emphasis upon the
relation of the organism, mental and physical, to the environment;
but even here (to omit again the studies which are purely biological
or ecological), "mental phenomena" or, more briefly, mind appears
to characterize the subject-matter and the scope of the science.
2 Psychol. Bull., 1918, XV., 89-95. It is regrettable that it should not have
occurred to any one of the speaker 's l ' series of the foremost representatives ' ' of
psychology to refer the anthropologist to this clarifying report.
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 347
Psychology's main concern is, then, with mind mind as it is con-
stituted, as it is organized, as it runs its fluent course, as it depends
upon bodily processes, as it develops in the individual, the species
and the race, as it suffers aberration and defect in disease, as it
creates language, custom, law, opinion, and tradition, as it is molded
and modified in "social" groups, or as it is allied with bodily func-
tions in such accomplishments as the attainment of knowledge, the
revival of the past and the individual's adjustment to the shifting
conditions of life. Mind: now directly scrutinized under experi-
mental conditions, now inferred from other empirical facts, now im-
plied in its products and its monuments but always mind. Here
the method is descriptive, there comparative, again genetic, or still
again hypothetical and explanatory, as in Freudianism and psycho-
analysis. Diversity of problems and diversity of methods, to be
sure ; but no necessary diversity in general scope or undertaking or
standpoint.
Failing in his search for a definition, Dr. Hrdlicka turned to the
bibliography of his neighboring discipline and tried to discern
among the annual list of titles in the Psychological Index the real
place and scope of psychology. He was thus led to the conclusion
that our interests * ' range from anatomy and histology of the nervous
system to mathematics, on the one hand, and metaphysics, on the
other, covering practically the whole vast range of phenomena re-
lating to the nervous system and mental activities of man and ani-
mals." A relatively large place is given as he finds to neurolog-
ical titles, "28 per cent, dealing with neuropathology and psychia-
try, 6.5 per cent, dealing with sociology, ethics, and philosophy, 3.5
per cent, were mixed and indefinite, ' ' and so on. The anthropologist
is evidently confused by the heterogeneity of the list, for he con-
cludes that it ' ' shows indefiniteness, incomplete crystallization. ' '
Now no one would be disposed to deny that such a bibliography
as the Index suggests a wide variety of topics and of interests. A
caution, however, may well be entered against the inference which
the critic draws from his inquiry. In the first place, he was unfor-
tunate in the volume (1918) which he chose. A relatively large
number of productive psychologists had then temporarily withdrawn
from the laboratories for governmental service. Those who remained
were distracted by new and peculiar duties. The literary output was
diminished by at least one-half. Furthermore, there appeared in the
year 1918 a vast amount of pathological material which spread well
beyond its usual limits. The traumatisms of war, nervous disorders
and mental diseases loomed large ; and the every-day work of the lab-
oratories was correspondingly reduced. Another year 's bibliography
348 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
would more accurately have reflected the normal interests and en-
deavors of the psychologist. In the second place, it must be observed
that no general bibliography of a fundamental science or a group of
related disciplines represents a closed and coherent system. Were
Dr. Hrdlicka to run through the files of the Index Medicus, of Eib-
liographia zoologica, L'annee pedagogique, Bibliographic der Sozial-
wissenschaften, or, possibly, the Bulletins bibliographiques of
L'Anthropologie, he would find in those lists, too, both a bewildering
variety of topics and a mass of material the inclusion of which ap-
pears, upon the surface, to be of doubtful propriety. Of course, the
more seasoned 1 the science the more coherent the rubrics and the more
logical the arrangement; but the difference is merely a difference of
degree.
Several years ago, when I undertook to bring out the Psycholog-
ical Index, I began with the zeal of the reformer. It seemed to me
that I could easily cut ragged corners, revise the headings, and elim-
inate a great deal of material which was not as I thought real and
proper psychology. Thanks to the patience of the former editor,
Professor Warren, I learned wisdom. I discovered that the bibliog-
raphy had to be arranged, above every other consideration, for the
easy and convenient use of the psychologists of the world. It was
designed as an aid to men, of whatever training and of whatever
special interest, who sought to make use of the year's publications
in any special field and for the solution of any particular problem.
The bibliography had so far as its internal arrangement was con-
cerned to speak a universal language. Logical relations and syste-
matic implications had, so to say, to be reduced to their lowest com-
mon denominator. The systems of psychology reside elsewhere : they
reside in the working plan of the trained psychologist who has
acquired a wide perspective in his broad field. Systems differ.
There is no doubt of that. They differ more decidedly in psychology
and, very likely, in anthropology than in some of the physical
sciences of longer lineage and with less complicated histories. The
important point to be observed in -this connection is the propriety of
invoking the systematic and comprehensive works rather than an
empirical collection of titles which subserves quite a different
purpose.
In spite of his disappointment over the ' ' indefiniteness " of psy-
chology, Dr. Hrdlicka has generously expressed the hope that anthro-
pology will presently arrive at a conjunctive understanding with her
neighbor. He expects psychology to "enlarge the scope of its ac-
tivities, until no small part of these shall really become anthropolog-
ical." Psychologists may not all support the conviction that their
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 349
subject "will unquestionably find its choisest field! in group studies;"
but they will not fail to appreciate the friendly counsel and criticism
of the anthropologist. The critic's own definition of his subject
should go a long way toward the affiliation which he desires. ' ' The
science of human variation, both in man and in his activities, ' ' would
seem to stand in fairly close and fairly definite relations to the science
of mind ; in relations at least as close and as definite as anthropology
now sustains to the two groups of biological and social sciences with
which it shares at once its "comparative method" and certain of its
major problems. For the time being, such substantial works as
Levy-Bruhl's Les f auctions mentales dans les societes inferieures
and Wundt's compendious Volkerpsychologie unmistakably affirm
a common interest and clearly call for concordant endeavor.
MADISON BENTLEY.
UNIVERSITY OP ILLINOIS.
REVIEWS AND ABSTRACTS OF LITERATURE
Complete Works: PLOTINUS. Tr. by KENNETH SYLVAN GUTHRIE.
4 vols. Platonist Press, Alpine, N. J.
Dr. Guthrie has here given us what professes to be the first com-
plete translation of Plotinus into English. Whatever one may think
of the value of the Plotinian metaphysics, it must be confessed that
such a publication ought to be a great event in philosophical scholar-
ship in America. For now the student who has had practically
nothing in English except the Select Works by Thomas Taylor, pub-
lished in 1817 in London, and later reprinted for the Bohn Library,
the scattered books translated by Stephen McKenna, and the frag-
mentary translations of Dr. Fuller in Bakewell's Source Book, has
all the works put into fairly clear and intelligible English and
arranged not in the more or less arbitrary order assigned them by
Porphyry, but in the order in which they were written. This may
be a mixed 1 blessing, for all references to the Enneads are after all to
the Porphyrian numbering, which Dr. Guthrie has been considerate
enough to preserve at one side, and one could see the grouping
which Plotinus 's most distinguished pupil thought most appropriate.
Still it gives one a certain insight into the development of the
thoughts of the master of Neo-Platonism as he saw fit to write them
down, in the latter part of his life.
The volumes in which Dr. Guthrie presents his work are con-
venient in size and not badly printed, although an occasional mis-
print serves to annoy the reader, if not to bewilder him. Yet the
350 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
translator assures his readers that he realizes the book is not perfect,
and begs them to be charitable "in view of the stupendousness of
the undertaking, in which he could get practically no assistance of
any kind, and also in view of the almost insuperable difficulties of
his own career" (Foreword, Vol. I., p. 2).
It is extraordinary to find that Dr. G-uthrie could get practically
no assistance. Students of Plotinus are by no means overcrowding
the study halls, but they are fairly numerous and not at all un-
friendly. There was always the author of The Problem of Evil in
Plotinus, in America, who has been called upon on one or two other
occasions to give assistance; there was Professor Picavet of the
College de France and of the Sorbonne, who has devoted a great
part of his long life to the establishment of Plotinus 's reputation
as the real master of the medieval philosophies, and who would have
been only too delighted to feel that someone in the United States
was sufficiently interested in his favorite topic to attempt a trans-
lation of the Enneads. And there were always the classic transla-
tions. There was the translation of Ficino, reprinted in the Creuzer-
Duebner text as published by Didot, which Dr. Guthrie certainly
knows as he has made use of its numbering in his translation of
Enn. III., viii (Vol. II., p. 531). There was the translation of
Mueller in German and of Bouillet 1 in French.
Now when a scholar makes a translation of a standard work,
it is only to be expected that he compare what he has done with
what others have done, that he see wherein he differ from them,
and wherein he gain support from them. When the work in ques-
tion is notoriously difficult and obscure, when the text is rough and
uncouth, when there exists no complete commentary on it and no
index to its words, it is almost a duty to consult the works of other
scholars for help and guidance. But Dr. Guthrie scarcely admits a
knowledge of other work on his author except that of Drews. And
yet his translation is due to the efforts of one man alone, the French
savant, Bouillet, Whose translation of Plotinus 'has been the source
of Dr. Guthrie 's without any acknowledgment whatsoever.
It is the purpose of this notice to prove that Dr. Guthrie has
simply presented to the American philosophical public a word-for-
word translation of Bouillet, except in one book, the original of
which may be or may not be Plotinus 's text itself. It is not our
purpose to make a satisfactory review of the translation as a whole.
Dr. Guthrie had the right to make whatever kind of translation he
desired ; but honesty would have compelled him to admit the source
of what he was translating.
i M-N. Bouillet : Les Enntades de Plotin, Paris, 1857, 3 vol.
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 351
To prove our point we shall give a few examples of the follow-
ing sort:
(a) Comparison of a passage selected at random from Bouillet
and from Guthrie, to show their typically intimate relation.
(&) Comparison of a passage selected at random from Guthrie
and Fuller, 2 to show their relative difference, and to show that the
supposed similarity between Guthrie and Bouillet is not accidental.
(c) Comparison of texts from Guthrie and St.-Hilaire to show
their difference.
(d) Incorporation in Guthrie '& text of material inserted in
Bouillet 's text for purposes of explanation; these passages of course
do not exist in the Greek.
(e) Relegation to foot-notes by Guthrie of explanatory material
printed in brackets by Bouillet.
(/) Incorporation in Guthrie 's text of what is in footnotes in
Bouillet.
(0) Comparison of texts of Guthrie, Bouillet, and the Greek
original, where Bouillet has expanded expressions from the Greek
or inserted new expressions and Guthrie has preserved them.
(ft) Comparison of texts from Bouillet and Guthrie as an in-
stance of what does not seem to have been a translation from the
French.
(a) THE INTIMATE RELATION BETWEEN GUTHRIE AND BOUILLET
1. Ennead, IV., iii, 26.
Bouillet (Vol. II., p. 315 f.) : "Si les deux elements qui composent
Guthrie (Vol. II., p. 430 f ) : "If the two elements which compose
I 9 animal concourent a 1'acte de la sensation, la sensation est com-
the animal share in the act of sensation, the sensation is com-
mune d I'dme et au corps, comme les actes de percer, de tisser.
mon to the soul and the body, such as the acts of piercing or weaving.
Ainsi, dans la sensation, Tame joue le role d ''artisan et le
Thus in sensation, the soul plays the part of the workman, and the
corps celui d 'instrument : le corps eprouve la passion ( Tra^ei ) et
body that of his tool; the body undergoes the experience, and
sert de messager a Tame; 1'ame percoit rimpression (T^OWS)
serves as messenger to the soul; the soul perceives the impression
produite dans le corps ou par le corps ; ou bien encore elle porte un
produced in the body, or by the body; or she forms a
jugement (/c/>t<ns) sur la passion qu'il a eprouvee.
judgment about the experience she has undergone.
2 Dr. B. A. G. Fuller, in Bakewell 's Source Book.
352 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
II en resulte que la sensation est une operation commune a 1'ame et
Consequently sensation is an operation common to the soul and
au corps.
body.
''II n'en saurait etre de meme de la memoire,
"This could not be the state of affairs with memory,
par laquelle Tame, ayant deja par la sensation pergu
iby which the soul, having already through sensation perceived
1 'impression produite dans le corps, la conserve ou la laisse echapper.
the impression produced in the body, preserves it, or dismisses it.
On pretendra peut-etre que la memoire aussi est commune a Tame
It might be claimed that memory also is common to the soul
et au corps, parce que sa bonte depend de notre
and body, because its efficiency depends on the adjustments of the
complexion. Nous repondrons que le corps peut entraver ou non
bodies. No doubt the body can hinder or promote
1'exercice de la memoire, sans que cette faculte cesse d'etre propre
the exercise of memory, without this faculty ceasing to be peculiar
a 1'ame. Comment essaiera-t-on de prouver que le souvenir des
to the soul. How shall we try to prove that the memory of
connaissances acquises par 1'etude appartient au compose et non a
knowledge acquired by study, belongs to the compound, and not to
Tame seule? Si I' 'animal est le compose de Tame et du corps,
the soul alone? If the organism be the composite of soul and body,
en ce sens qu'il est une troisieme chose engendree par leur union, il
in the sense that it is some third object begotten by their union, it
sera absurde de dire qu'il n'est ni 1'ame, ni le corps. En effet, il
will be absurd to say that it is neither soul nor body. Indeed, it
ne saurait etre une chose differente de 1'ame et du corps, ni si
could not be anything different from the soul and body, neither if
1'ame et le corps sont transformed dans le compose dont
the soul and bocly were transformed into the composite of which
ils sont les elements, ni s'ils forment un mixte, de telle sorte que 1'ame
they are the elements, nor if they formed a mixture, so that the soul
ne soit plus qu'en puissance dans 1 'animal; meme dans ce cas,
would be no more than potentially in the organism. Even in this case,
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 353
c'est encore Tame, et 1'ame seule qui se souviendrait. Ainsi, dans
it is still the soul, and the soul alone, that would remember. Thus in
un melange de miel et de vin, si Ton sent quelque douceur, c'est
a mixture of honey and wine, it is the honey alone that should
au miel seul qu'il faut 1'attribuer."
be credited with any sweetness that may be tasted."
Now no one can read these two texts so placed on the page and
not be struck by their similarity. It is not enough to say that they
naturally would be similar coming from the same original, for there
are a few expressions which are peculiar to these two renderings of
the -Greek and not to others. One could point to the rendering of
virrjptTovvros as "serves as messenger to the soul" (sert de messager
a I'ame}, although any phrase which would indicate service would
do. One might point to the use of the third personal feminine pro-
noun with soul for its antecedent. But clearer cases are coming. This
random selection is simply to serve as a sample of the average rela-
tion between the two texts.
Let us now compare two English translations by Fuller and
Guthrie, to show that they are by no means the same even though
they both are translations from the same text, and to throw added
light on the fact that the similarity between Bouillet and Guthrie is
not accidental. We are limited in our choice of texts to those we
have at hand, which are on Dr. Fuller's part simply the texts
he has translated for Professor Bakewell.
(6) COMPARISON OF PASSAGES SELECTED FROM FULLER AND GUTHRIE
1. Ennead, V., ix, 5.
Fuller (Bakewell, Source Book, p. 357) : "It is necessary to
understand then by intellect, if we are to attach any true signifi-
cance to the name, not the potential intellect, or the intellectual
knowledge developed out of ignorance. Did we, we should have to
seek for yet another intellect prior to this. By intellect we are to
understand that which is intellect in actu, and eternally. But if
its thought be not imported from without, when it thinks anything
it must itself be the occasion of its thought, and when it is possessed
of any object be the occasion of that possession. But if it be the
occasion and source of its thought, it will itself be the object of its
thought. For were its essence one thing, and the object of its
thought another, its essence would not be an intelligible object, etc."
Guthrie (Vol. I., p. 107) : " Taking it in the genuine sense, Intel-
ligence is not only potential, arriving at being intelligent after
354 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
having been unintelligent for otherwise, we would be forced to
seek out some still higher principle but is in actualization, and is
eternal. As it is intelligent by itself, it is by itself that it thinks
what it thinks, and that it possesses what is (sic) possesses. Now
since it thinks of itself and by itself, it itself is what it thinks. If
we could distinguish between its exitsence (sic) and its thought,
its ' being' would be unintelligent; it would be potential, not in
actualization. Thought, therefore, must not be separated from its
object, although, from sense-objects, we have become accustomed
to conceive of intelligible entities as distinct from each other. ' '
Reading this, one recognizes the similarity of thought, but no
one would be so bold as to accuse either of these translators of being
influenced by the other. For the manner of expression is entirely
different. The sentence structure is not the same, the use by one
of the scholastic expression in actu, and by the other of in actualiza-
tion, shows a difference, in a measure, in habits of thinking. But
as soon as one sees the French, one has no doubt whatsoever of the
origin of Guthrie's phraseology and sentence structure. Bouillet
begins, and to save space we give only his beginning (Vol. III., p.
137) : " L 'Intelligence, pour prendre ce mot dans son vrai sens,
n'est pas seulement en puissance, n 'arrive pas a etre intelligente
apres avoir ete inintelligente (sinon, nous serions obliges de chercher
encore un autre principe superieur a elle) ; elle est en acte, elle est
eternelle, etc., etc." The very parentheses are retained by Guthrie.
But, one might ask, maybe any French text would show similar
peculiarities, and similar resemblance to Guthrie's. Even though
another English translation might be different, another French
translation might be like it. This is, of course, rather an imaginary
objection, but it is interesting to see how different Guthrie is from
St.-Hilaire, for example, whose text is at hand.
(c) GUTHRIE AND SAINT-HILAIEE
Ennead, II., viii, 1.
St-Hilaire (De I'Ecole d'Alexandrie, p. 199) : "Pourquoi les
choses eloignees semblent-elles plus petites? Pourquoi, tout ecartees
qu'elles sont les unes des autres, paraissent-elles se toucher? Pour-
quoi les choses rapprochees nous semblent-elles aussi grandes qu'elles
le sont reellement, et n 'avoir entre elles que la distance qu'elles ont
vraiement ?
"Les choses eloignees semblent rapetissees parce que la lumiere
se comprime suivant la vue, et se reduit a la dimension de la
pupille. Plus la matiere de 1'objet visible est eloignee, plus 1 'image
nous en arrive comme isolee de 1'objet; c'est en quelque sorte une
image de sa quantite et de sa qualite, qui nous parvient, etc."
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 355
Guthrie (Vol. III., p. 680) : "What is the cause that when dis-
tant visible objects seem smaller, and that, though separated by a
great space, they seem to be close to each other, while if close,
we see them in their true size, and their true distance? The
cause of objects seeming smaller at a distance might be that
light needs to be focused near the eye, and to 'be accommodated to
the size of the pupils ; that the greater the distance of the matter of
the visible object, the more does its form seem to separate from it
during its transit to the eyes; and that, as there is a form of quan-
tity as well as of quality, it is the reason (or form) of the latter, etc."
But turn to Bouillet and one finds no such dissimilarity. "We
find (Vol. I., p. 250), "D'ou vient que, dans 1'eloignement, les
objets visibles paraissent plus petits, et que, bien que separes par
un grand espace, ils semiblent etre voisins, tandis que, s'ils sont pres
de nous, nous les voyons avec leur vraie grandeur et leur vraie
distance ?
"Si les objets paraissent plus petits dans 1'eloignement, est-ce
parce que la lumiere demande a etre rassemblee vers 1'oeil et accom-
mode a la grandeur de la prunelle, etc. etc." We can stop here,
for this much shows the similarity which we are trying to show.
It should be noted in passing that Guthrie often translates Bouillet 's
rhetorical questions by the English potential. One must not be led
astray by that, however.
(d) INCORPORATION IN GUTHRIE 's TEXT OF MATERIAL INSERTED
IN BOUILLET 's FOR PURPOSES OF EXPLANATION, WHICH
MATERIAL DOES NOT EXIST IN PLOTINUS
1. Ennead, V., iv, 2.
Bouillet (Vol. III., p. 67) : "Mais, outre cet Intelligible (indenti-
que a 1'Intelligence) il y a un autre Intelligible (I'lntelligible
supreme, le Premier)."
Guthrie (Vol. I., p. 136) : "But besides this intelligible (entity,
namely intelligence), there is another (higher) intelligible (the
supreme Intelligible, the First)."
2. Ennead, IV., ix, 3.
Bouillet (Vol. II., p. 499) : "... on trouve que la sensation n'est
pas semblable dans toutes les parties, (c'est-a-dire dans toutes les
ames particulieres), que la raison n'est pas dans le Tout (mais dans
certaines ames seulement) ..."
Guthrie (Vol. I., p. 143) : "... we find that sensation is not
similar in tall its parts (that is, in all the individual souls) ; that
reason is not in all (but in certain souls exclusively) ..."
356 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
3. Ennead, II., iv, 11.
Bouillet (Vol. I., p. 212) : After the account of a supposed objec-
tion by an Aristotelian : * ' . . . ( Voici la reponse que nous f erons a
cette objection) ..."
Guthrie (Vol. I., p. 210) : ". . . (Our answer to the above ob-
jection is this) ..."
4. Ennead, III., ix, 1.
After an opening paragraph on one of the implications of the
Platonic doctrine of the relation of the Ideas to the Intelligence,
Bouillet adds (Vol. II., p. 239) : " (II nest pas necessaire d'admettre
cette consequence.) " Guthrie (Vol. I., p. 220) parallels this bracket
with "(This consequence is not necessary.)"
These are only a few examples of what is common to almost
every page of Guthrie and Bouillet. Though they seem to skip
about in the Enneads, it must not be forgotten that the order of
the Enneads is not the order of Guthrie 's translation. It is safe to
say that Guthrie always preserves explanatory parentheses from
Bouillet. Needless to say these parentheses do not exist in the
Greek text.
Sometimes Guthrie does not leave these explanatory brackets
in the body of the text but relegates them to footnotes. Let us have
some examples of this practise.
(e) RELEGATION TO FOOT-NOTES BY GUTHRIE OF EXPLANATORY
MATERIAL PRINTED IN BRACKETS BY BOUILLET
1. Ennead, IV., viii, 2.
Bouillet (Vol. II., p. 479) : "Le Demiurge (qui est 1'Ame uni-
verselle) ..."
Guthrie (Vol. I., p. 121) : "Does the Demiurge . . ." (Footnote:
"The Creator, who is the universal Soul").
2. Ennead, VI., ix, 8.
Bouillet (Vol. III., p. 556) : "Les corps ne peuvent s'unir entre
eux (parce qu'ils ne se laissent pas penetrer) ..."
Guthrie (Vol. I., p. 164) : "Bodies can not unite mutually ..."
(Footnote: "Because they do not allow of mutual penetration.")
3. Ennead, V., i, 1.
Bouillet (Vol. III., p. 3) : ". . . le desir de n' appartenir qu'a
elles-memes (c'est a dire le desir qui a conduit les ames a se separer
primitivement de Dieu et a s'unir aux corps)."
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 357
Guthrie (Vol. I., p. 173) : ". . . the desire to belong to none but
themselves." (Footnote: "That is the desire which leads souls to
separate themselves primitively from the divinity and to unite them-
selves to bodies.")
4. Ennead, II., v, 3.
Bouillet (Vol. L, p. 230) : "Ainsi, dans le monde intelligible, il
y a des choses qui sont ou ne sont pas en puissance. Mais 1'ame est
la puissance de ces choses (la puissance de produire et non la
puissance de devenir ces choses." This is followed by a footnote
referring to Aristotle, Metaph., X., 2.
Guthrie (Vol. II., p. 346) : "Thus in the intelligible world there
are things which exist, or do not exist potentially. But the soul is
the potentiality of these things." The brackets of Bouillet here
again appear as a footnote : ' ' That is, their producing potentiality,
and not the potentiality of becoming these things as thought Aris-
totle, Met., X., 2."
Now just as Guthrie sometimes put Bouillet 's brackets into foot-
notes so he also sometimes puts Bouillet 's footnotes into brackets,
incorporating them in the text as explanatory matter.
(/) INCORPORATION IN GUTHRIE 's TEXT OF BOUILLET 's FOOTNOTES
1. Ennead, II., v, 1.
Bouillet (Vol. I., p. 223) : The opening words of this book are,
"On dit que telle chose est en puissance, que telle chose est en acte."
Bouillet then gives a note explaining that the "on" is Aristotle.
Guthrie (Vol. II., p. 341) : "(Aristotle) spoke of (things) exist-
ing 'potentially' etc."
2. Ennead, V., iv, 4.
Bouillet (Vol. III., p. 136) : "Qu'on ne croie pas, comme le font
quelques-uns ..." These "quelques-uns" are then explained thus
in a footnote, "Creuzer pense que Plotin designe ici Anaxagore ou
Democrite. Nous croyons qu'il s'agit des Stoiciens, parce que notre
auteur les refute par les memes arguments dans I'Enneade, IV., liv.
vii, 8, no. 14; t. II., p. 457-459."
Guthrie (Vol. I., p. 106) : "The Stoics are wrong in thinking ..."
Then footnote, "Stoics, see iv, 7, 8." It should be remarked in
passing that Guthrie does not bracket "Stoics," apparently being
so convinced of the truth of Bouillet 's opinion that he felt that
Plotinus himself should have included the name in his text.
3. Ennead, IL, iv, 1.
Bouillet (Vol. L, p. 195) : "La matiere est un sujet . . ." Foot-
note: "Le sujet, c'est ce dont tout le reste est attribut, ce qui n'est
attribut de rien. (Aristote, Metaphysique, VII., 3.) "
358 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
Guthrie (Vol. I., p. 197) : "Matter is a substrate (or subject)
underlying nature, as thought Aristotle." Footnote: "(Met. VII.,
3.)" Again, as in example 2 above, "as thought Aristotle" is not
bracketed.
4. Hid.
Bouillet (Vol. I., p. 196) : "D'autres admettent que la matiere
est incorporelle. " Footnote after "D'autres," "Les Pythagoriciens
les Platoniciens, les Peripacteticiens. ' '
Guthrie (Vol. L, p. 198): "Others (Pythagoreans, Platonists,
and Aristotelians) insist that matter is incorporeal."
5. Ennead, III., ix, 2.
Bouillet (Vol. II., p. 241) : "La totalite d'une science se divise
en propositions particulieres, etc., etc." Footnote: "Porphyre
attribue cette comparaison a Nicolas de Damas. Voy. Des Facultes
de I'Ame, t. I., p. xcii. Voy. aussi L'Enneade, IV., liv. ix, no. 5."
Guthrie (Vol. I., p. 222): "(As Nicholas of Damascus) used
to say, the totality of a science is divided into particular propo-
sitions ..."
6. Ennead, III., iv, 1.
Bouillet (Vol. II., p. 88) translated the Greek fawmurn by c 'hy-
postase" with a footnote saying, "Ficin rend ce mot par subsidens
actus (acte substantiel)."
Guthrie (Vol. I., p. 233) says: "... ('hypostases,' substantial
acts, or) forms of existence ..." with no note whatsoever, although
"substantial act" is hardly an English phrase which means very
much to a modern reader.
As one will see very readily most of these footnotes of Bouillet
which have been incorporated into the body of Guthrie 's text are
the attributing of certain opinions to certain people or groups of
people. Where Bouillet has an opinion about the authorities to
whom they should be attributed, Guthrie shares that opinion. And
in one instance, at least, where Bouillet is not sure, Guthrie shares
the uncertainty. In this same third Ennead, Book IV., Chapter 3,
Bouillet translates, "Qu'est done notre demon? . . . (Est-ce la
puissance qui agit principalement en nous comme le croient quel-
ques-uns?)" And Guthrie parallels this with (Vol. I., p. 235),
"What then is our guardian? ... (Is it the power which acts prin-
cipally in us as some people think?) " The bracket of course is not
in the Greek, though in both French and the English, but why does
not Guthrie know who the people are, who think an opinion which
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 359
he does not hesitate to put into the body of his text ? Bouillet, un-
fortunately, does not give him a clue.
These instances in themselves, when one sees them repeated on
one page after another, force one to the conclusion to which the
.writer has been forced. But there are still other types of passage
which show Guthrie 's reliance on Bouillet perhaps more convinc-
ingly.
It is well known how compact Greek is and how a translation
must often expand into a phrase what is only a word or two in the
original. This, of course, occurs in all translation, from no matter
what language. But when two translators use exactly the same ex-
pressions as expansions of a few words in Greek, one need not hesi-
tate to see in the resemblance something which is not a mere coin-
cidence.
(g) COMPARISON OP TEXTS OF BOUILLET, GUTHRIE, AND THE GREEK
ORIGINAL WHERE THE TRANSLATIONS SHOW EXPANSIONS OF EX-
PRESSIONS AND INSERTIONS OF NEW EXPRESSIONS
1. Ennead, VI., iv, 6.
Bouillet. (Vol. III., p. 317) : "Pourquoi (si TAme universelle
possede la grandeur que nous lui attribuons) ne s 'approche-t-elle
pas d'un autre corps (que de celui qu'elle anime, c'est-a-dire d'un
corps particulier.) ?"
Guthrie (Vol. II., p. 294) : "Why (if the universal Soul possess
the magnitude here attributed to her) does she not approach some
other body (than that which she animates; that is, some individual
body)?"
Greek (Creuzer-Duebner text): Tt'ow owe eV oAAo o-w/
2. Ennead, IV., ix, 5.
Bouillet (Vol. II., p. 502) : "Ces verites excitent notre incredulite,
parce qu'ici-bas notre raison est faible et qu'elle est obscurcie par le
corps. Dans le monde intelligible, au contraire, toutes les verites
sont claires et chacune en particulier est evidente. ' '
Guthrie (Vol. I., p. 146) : "These truths excite our incredulity,
because here below our reason is weak, and it is confused by the body.
In the intelligible world, however, all the verities are clear, and each
is evident, by itself."
Greek ( Creuzer-Duebner text) : 'AAAa ravra Bia rty ^ripav do-0o/etav
cwriOTetTai, /cat Sta TO 0-0^10. 7ricncoTtTar CKCI Se <ava Travra, /cat ocao-rov.
To how many people would it occur to translate ravra by ' ' these
truths" when it says "these things" which, by the way, is Dr.
Fuller 's translation ? To whom would it seem natural, at first blush,
350 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
to translate rfy ^ere/aav aarOtveiav l ' the weakness of our reason, ' ' when
all Plotinus says is, "our want of strength," "our feebleness"? To
whom would the inevitable translation of dTrioTeTTeu seem to be " excite
our incredulity," when the Greek means primitively "to be dis-
trusted"? How does Guthrie get "'all these verities" out of Trdvra
without inspiration, and "each is evident by itself" out of a mere
ocao-rov, when all he had before him was, ' ' But in the intelligible world
(if you wish, for e*i) each and everything is clear"?
But in all fairness to Dr. Guthrie there is one book in his four
volumes, one out of fifty-four, which one can not say positively was
translated from Bouillet's French. In order to show what the writer
has considered fair evidence of independence on his part, let us give
a short passage comparing Bouillet and Guthrie in this book.
(h) COMPARISON OF TEXTS FROM GUTHRIE AND BOUILLET WHERE
THERE SEEMS TO HAVE BEEN No DIRECT RELATION
Ennead, I., ii, 1.
Bouillet (Vol. I., p. 51) : "Puisque le mal regne ici-bas et domine
inevitablement en ce monde, et puisque Tame veut fuir le mal, il
faut fuir d 'ici-bas. Mais quel en est le moyen? C'est, dit Platon,
de nous rendre semblables a Dieu. Or nous y reussirons en nous
formant a la justice, a la saintete, a la sagesse, et en general
a la vertu. ' '
Guthrie (Vol. I., p. 256): "Man must flee from (this world)
here below (for two reasons) : because it is the nature of the soul to
flee from evil, and because inevitable evil prevails and dominates
this world here below. What is this flight (and how can we accom-
plish it) ? (Plato) tells us it consists in "being assimilated to divin-
ity." This then can be accomplished by judiciously conforming to
justice, and holiness ; in short, by virtue. ' '
If this is our standard of independence, no one can maintain,
against our final judgment, that we have been too severe in attrib-
uting a lack of independence to the other passages which we have
cited herein. We are willing to admit that this one book may be
Guthrie 's own translation, simply because there are a number of
passages as dissimilar in structure, if not always in wording, to their
equivalent in Bouillet as the above.
But when one passes from the first chapter of the book to the
second, one notices the old streak showing up again.
Bouillet (/&., p. 54) : "Examinons d'abord les vertus par les-
quelles nous devenons semblables a Dieu, et cherchons quel genre
tTidentite il y a entre 1'image qui dans notre ame constitue la vertu
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 361
et le principe qui dans 1 'Intelligence supreme est 1 'archetype de la
vertu sans etre la vertu. II y a deux especes de ressemblance : 1'une
exige 1'identite de nature entre les choses qui sont semblables entre
elles, comme le sont celles qui precedent d'un meme principe;
etc., etc."
Guthrie (/&., p. 258 f.) : ''Let us first examine the virtues by
which we are assimilated to the divinity, and let us study the iden-
tity between our soul-image which constitutes virtue, and the su-
preme Intelligence's principle which, without being virtue, is its
archetype. There are two kinds of resemblance: the first entails
such identity of nature as exists when both similar things proceed
from a same principle; etc., etc."
Yet, as we have said, we are willing to grant that this one book
may have been translated in fair independence from Bouillet's text.
But for the rest of Dr. Guthrie 's translation, as far as we have ex-
amined it, and we have gone through it almost word for word, there
is no passage which does not bear every mark of having been made
not merely with the guidance of Bouillet's twenty years of toil, but
with the calm and deliberate lifting of every illuminating phrase,
every thoughtful and painstaking expression, every emendation and
suggestion of emendation which served his purpose. And whereas
Bouillet, with that true humility of the real scholar, pays every
tribute even to so slight an aid as Thomas Taylor's, Dr. Guthrie
makes little mention of any other work on Plotinus except that of
Drews, and then only to find fault with it.
In the first three volumes of this translation there are about five
or six references to Bouillet's work in the footnotes, which indicate
that the author was acquainted with the French original. In the
fourth volume his knowledge of Bouillet is more openly admitted,
for (p. 1214) he reproduces in a table the numbering of Bouillet's
edition of Prophyry's Theory of the Intelligibles. He says in a note
that he follows the numbering of Bouillet "because the other orders
differ anyway, and because this is the one that Porphyry introduced
into the works of Plotinos." But it is noticeable that Bouillet him-
self translates this work, and again Guthrie follows him almost as
closely as he does in the Enneads.
Of the value of the Plotinic Studies, as Dr. Guthrie calls them,
we shall not speak here, since our sole interest has been to invite the
attention of the philosophical reading public to the genesis of the
translation itself. No criticism is here made of Dr. Guthrie because
he has translated from the French instead of from the Greek ; he had
a perfectly good right to do so if he so chose and the result would
have been worth having. But to have done so and then to have ad-
362 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
vertised it as the first English translation, with no acknowledgment,
is too much for honest scholars to stomach.
The first real translation of the Enneads into English is yet to
be made.
GEORGE BOAS.
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA.
JOURNALS AND NEW BOOKS
EEVUE DE METAPHYSIQUE ET DE MORALE. Novem-
ber-December, 1919. La volonte, la liberte, et la certitude d'apres
Renouvier (pp. 685-704) (A suivre) : 0. HAMELIN.-" Volition is
that characteristic of certain phenomena of consciousness, which
makes them seem capable of not having appeared, though all condi-
tions had remained the same." Thus volition is by definition free.
Using this criterion, Renouvier denies volitional character to all
physical movements, and to all conscious states which seem to arise
spontaneously, like hallucinations and dreams. Only those states of
consciousness which are characterized by effort, and which seem
motivated or reflective, can be called volitional and free. H. Hame-
lin criticizes narrowing the meaning of the term volitional to em-
brace so limited a class of mental phenomena. Les derniers progres
de la physique (pp. 705-738) : L. WEBER. -The following subjects
are discussed: (1) the theory of relativity, (2) the theory of quanta,
(3) spectrum analysis of X-rays and the light which it throws on
crystal structure, (4) the re-interpretation of the Table of Elements
on the basis of research into radioactivity. Both the relativity and
the quanta theories are far from being demonstrated, but the evi-
dence for each is drawn from many different branches of physics,
and gives eloquent testimony to the ideal unity of the science. Both
theories, moreover, suggest a description of the world, which departs
still more radically than the old atomism from naive empirical views.
A bibliography supplements the account. La psychologie de Ribot
et la pensee contemporaine (pp. 739-763): R. LENOIR. - Ribot 's
work is examined as a reaction against the traditional ideational
psychology. "The identification of consciousness with that immedi-
ate feeling which we have of ourselves, a study of sensibility which
is not accompanied by a like study of intelligence, can contribute to
breaking English associationalism by introducing a dynamic point
of view, and can clarify the psychological study of movements. But
it is at the price of some confusion in general psychology. And it
seems that Ribot undoes little by little the work of Auguste Comte
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 363
and Renouvier." Enseignement. De la formation des maUres
primaires (pp. 765-769): A. MEILLET. -M. Meillet disagrees with
those who believe that the natural sciences are of primary importance
in providing that kind of culture which is most valuable to the art of
the elementary teacher. He insists first upon an understanding of
one's own language, its logic and its possibilities of expression. The
study of man's history is of next importance in the education of
elementary teachers, even though experience shows that history can
not be taught with good results in primary schools. Questions
Pratiques. La controverse nationalitaire (pp. 771-803) : TH.
EUYSSEN. - There are two opposing theories of nationality; one re-
gards the facts of geographical location, of race, of language, and of
culture as the proper criteria of nationality; the other holds that
the will of the people as expressed in plebescites is the only satisfac-
tory test. The first theory can be used in practise to sanction auto-
cratic imperialism; the plebescite principle, if thoroughly applied,
would involve "a constant surrender of sovereignty on the part of
the existing Nation-state to the demands of groups which declared
themselves to be nations." Problems of conflicting nationality can
be solved only by changes in the present manner of exercising state
sovereignty. Groups of different culture within the state should be
given as much autonomy as possible, and their development encour-
aged. "Autonomy within federation is the formula proposed to
statesmen responsible for deciding the political status of nationali-
ties still in conflict." Necrologie. Georges Simeon (1888-1919)
(pp. 805-807). -Simeon was a young philosopher of promise, who
had written several essays on the sentiment of patriotism. He died
in June, 1919, as a result of gas-poisoning sustained during the war.
Tables des Matieres (pp. 809-811). -Articles appearing in the Revue
during the year 1919 are listed both in a Table des Auteurs and in
a Table des Articles.
Ross, Edward Alsworth. The Principles of Sociology. New York:
The Century Co. 1920. Pp. xviii -f 703.
Watt, Henry J. The Foundations of Music. Cambridge, England :
University Press. 1919. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. Pp.
xiii -f 239. 18s.
Merz, John Theodore. A Fragment on the Human Mind. New
York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 1920. Pp. xiv + 309. $4.50.
364 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
NOTES AND NEWS
PROFESSOR JOHN DEWEY has received an additional year's leave
of absence from Columbia University for the academic year 1919-
1920. The authorities at the University of Peking have requested
him to remain, and he feels that this extra year will enable him to
return to America with a more thorough understanding of Chinese
thought and civilization. For the past year he has been lecturing at
the Government University of Peking, and although there have been
several serious student strikes there against unpopular governmental
policies, the students have usually made an exception in the case
of his courses and so prevented any interruption in his work. He
has been giving three courses this year, the "Philosophy of Educa-
tion, " ' ' History of Greek Philosophy, ' ' and * * Logic. ' ' Next year he
has been asked to give, in addition to these courses, one on the "In-
terpretation of the History of Philosophy," which can be used as a
standard basis for the study of the subject. This fact, and others
mentioned in his letters, indicate that there is in China an increas-
ing interest in western philosophy. Professor Dewey writes in a
recent letter that one of the largest publishing houses in China has
just completed arrangements for the publication of extensive trans-
lations of important works, especially in the field of philosophy.
THE delegation of the American Philosophical Association to the
Congress of Philosophy at Oxford next September has just been
announced, and is as follows: Professor William P. Montague, of
Columbia University, (Chairman) ; Professor John E. Boodin, of
Carlton College, and Professor E. F. Alfred Hoernle, of Harvard
University.
THE Butler Medal in gold, which is awarded every five years by
Columbia University "for the most distinguished contribution made
during the preceding five-year period anywhere in the world to phi-
losophy or to educational theory, practise or administration" was
awarded this year to Benedetto Croce in recognition of the comple-
tion of his Filosofia dello Spirito by the publication in 1917 of the
fourth volume entitled Teoria e Storia della Storiografia.
THE Butler Medal in silver or bronze, which is awarded annually
to "the graduate of Columbia University in any of its parts who has
during the year preceding shown the most competence in philosophy
or in educational theory, practise, or administration" was awarded
in silver to Henry Eutgers Marshall in recognition of the publication
in 1919 of his volume entitled Mind and Conduct.
VOL. XVII, No. 14. JULY 1, 1920
THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS
PKOFESSOR HENDERSON'S " FITNESS" AND THE
LOCUS OF CONCEPTS
TDROFESSOR L. J. HENDERSON'S two volumes, The Fitness
J- of the Environment 1 and The Order of Nature, 2 along with
several magazine articles, inaugurate a sort of revival of the old
problem of teleology. After adducing certain empirical data, which
seem to be both novel and important, he declares that these argue
a relation between past phenomena and present that is not mechan-
ical, but is, in some sort or other, teleological. Professor Hender-
son refrains, being a ' ' man of science, ' ' from spinning metaphysical
cobwebs around this teleology. Indeed he goes only as far as he
feels that the evidence forces him to go, and then, finding himself
"face to face with the problem of design," he takes "refuge in the
vaguest possible term which can be employed. That term is teleol-
ogy." 3 By "vaguest" he means of course the least fraught with
unwarranted hypothesis and connotation. Partly by reason of this
seemly reticence, the brief metaphysical argument which leads him
from the facts to teleology constitutes a challenge which the con-
vinced mechanist can hardly afford to ignore.
Professor Henderson has stated (this argument very compactly,*
and in one place has compressed it to a single passage. "The
process of evolution consists in the increase of diversity of systems
and their activities, in the multiplication of physical occurrences, or
briefly in the production of much from little. Other things being
equal, there is maximum freedom for such evolution on account of
a certain unique arrangement of unique properties of matter. A
change in any one of these properties would greatly diminish the
freedom. The chance that this unique ensemble of properties should
occur by accident is almost infinitely small. . . . Therefore there is
a causal connection between the properties of the elements and the
1 Macmillan, N. Y., 1913.
2 Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1917.
a "The Teleology of Inorganic Nature," Phil. Eev., 1916, XXV., p. 278.
* The Fitness of the Environment, pp. 249-273; Phil. Bev., 1916, XXV.,
pp. 265-281; this JOURNAL, 1916, XIII., pp. 326-27.
365
366 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
freedom of evolution. But (the properties of the universal elements
antedate or are logically prior to those restricted aspects of evolu-
tion with which we are concerned. Hence we are obliged to re-
gard the properties as in some intelligible sense a preparation for
the process of planetary evolution. For we can not imagine an
interaction between the properties of hydrogen, carbon and oxygen
and any process of planetary evolution or any similar process by
which the properties of the elements should have been modified
throughout the universe. Therefore the properties of the elements
must for the present be regarded as possessing a teleological
character. ' ' s
If I recall aright, Professor R. B. Perry has somewhere expressed
the view that this is nothing more than the ancient argument from
design: and such was for a time my own belief. Yet this verdict
seems scarcely just to the Professor Henderson, who writes, ' ' Science
has finally put the old teleology to death;" 8 andi, "Experience
seems to show that the only kind of hypothesis which can find con-
clusive scientific support, or sound basis in the phenomena of matter
and energy, is a mechanistic hypothesis;" 7 and again, of one of
the most notorious strongholds of teleology, "vitalism has perhaps
not had a positive success in three centuries." 8 Clearly to Pro-
fessor Henderson's mind, at least, his argument is something very
different from anything to be found in Paley or the Bridgewater
Treatises.
A more pregnant criticism is one that Professor H. C. Brown
has made in his review of The Order of Nature. 9 "The treatment
of concepts in reaching this analysis, however," says Professor
Brown, referring to Professor Henderson's analysis of the evidence,
"seems to the reviewer to be a curiously tangled mixture of idealism
and scholastic realism." In other words the author, as indeed he
himself admits, has overstepped "1jhe boundaries of natural science"
and adventured "upon the foreign field of metaphysics;" 10 and in
so doing has, as he would probably not admit, unsuspectingly intro-
duced a teleology that lay not in his empirical data but was in-
sidiously contained in his procedure and his instruments of thought
his more philosophical concepts.
That this criticism is a sound one I am quite convinced. And
indeed this new teleology seems to be an especially interesting
illustration of a human fraility which I wish might receive the more
Phil. Eev., 1916, XXV., pp. 271-72.
The Fitness of the Environment, p. 311.
T Ibid., p. 285.
s Hid., pp. 284-85.
This JOUKNAL, 1917, XIV., pp. 557-59.
10 Fitness, pp. 307 and 312.
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 367
explicit attention of philosophers. Briefly, this infirmity can be
called the misapplication of concepts, but as a topic of philosophical
study it might well be brought under a more general caption "the
locus of concepts." There is, namely, for any concept which the
mind entertains a definite locus, or range of applicability : within its
locus the concept may be a useful instrument of thought, but if one
attempts to apply it outside of its proper range it becomes at once
misleading or meaningless. That is, in the latter event, the "con-
cept" ceases to be a concept at all; it vanishes quite, and one has
left in one's mind or on one's tablet nothing but the bare word, a
verbal image merely, or wasted ink. For a gross illustration, it
means nothing to speak of "love" among the inorganic elements.
And in general the miscarriage of truth is perhaps not so frequently
error, in the familiar sense of an assertion which is significant but
untrue, as it is verbiage. This is the most insidious hazard of
thought. It were better if only the worthless verbal coin would
vanish when the conceptual meaning which is its value has been lost.
Now it is, as I think, because Professor Henderson has misap-
prehended the locus of some few concepts that he finds himself
brought, though with obvious reluctance, to his very temperate yet
earnest espousal of the cause of teleology. It is therefore for two
purposes that I propose the following examination of his argument :
firstly, in order to vindicate, if I may so say, the cause of unquali-
fied mechanism ; and secondly, in order to illustrate very briefly the
locus of concepts.
In the argument of Professor Henderson as quoted above, the
concepts whose loci need investigation are uniqueness, maximum,
chance, and preparation. I shall take up these, with some nearly
related variants that occur elsewhere in his writings; and in ad-
dition, the notion of "changeless" as applied by Professor Hender-
son to the properties of matter.
1. Uniqueness. We must now look at the argument more closely.
All physical and chemical (including vital) processes are properly
to be considered as changes of "phases" and of "systems" (Willard
Gibbs). Evolution itself depends on the plenitude of such changes.
In these changes some of the properties of substances (e. g., the
high solvent capacity of water) play an eminent role: they figure
largely as the causes, or the requisite conditions, of life and of
organic evolution. Now Professor Henderson has surveyed the
elements and their compounds and selected out for further con-
sideration those whose properties do play this important part in
life and evolution, 11 that is, those which are fit for this purpose and
"fitted" to this end. He has thus slipped in the teleology, at the
11 Fitness, pp. 248-253.
368 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
very outset, which lie later (brings forth and presents for our
respectful admiration. And it is scarcely to foe wondered at that
the substances so selected appear in the sequel as "uniquely" and
designedly "fitted" to bear the burden of both life and evolution.
He, however, does not admit this because he finds that these
teleologicai properties (for I insist that they have already become
"teleologicai" by his own purposive selection) are the properties
of very few elements, 12 and these among the most abundant in our
universe. That is, life and organic evolution depend mainly on
carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, and these exist in plenty.
To this of course, so far as it bears on teleology, the mechanist
replies merely: Well, what of it? Must your teleologicai properties
be distributed with mathematical impartiality among the eighty odd
elements? Would] you have been less intrigued if your big Three
had happened to be a big Four (as it would have been if you had
not chosen to exclude nitrogen), or indeed a big Fifty-six? Cer-
tainly no mechanist, if he keeps his head, will ever feel concerned
over any amount of teleology which Professor Henderson may con-
jure out of the bag which we have so plainly seen him stuff to burst-
ing when he first stepped on to the stage.
But the mechanist may not keep his head. He may be beguiled
and deluded when Professor Henderson so solemnly tells him that
these are, not teleologicai properties, but "unique" properties.
Now I suppose the locus of the notion "unique" to be this: (1) a
class of objects, (2) which are not all alike. Then, that a single
object or group of objects which is (otherwise than "numerically")
unlike any other object or group of objects contained in the class
may be said to be "unique" in that particular universe of discourse
(the given class) and (3) in respect to that property in which it is
unlike the other members. Since Professor Henderson is dealing
with concrete elements and their concrete properties, every last one
of which is in fact unique, he is no danger of applying the term
outside of its proper locus. And I should like to know what ele-
12 The convergence of teleologicai properties is, alas, not without flaw. For
instance, mercury has a most enviable and " unique" surface tension which if it
had been possessed by water, would have covered our planet with a flora and
fauna so luxuriant that Mr. H. G. Wells 's gigantesque imaginings (The Food of
the Gods) would be as nothing. The surface tension of mercury is 436, and
that of water but 75 (Fitness, p. 126) : a strange anti-teleology. And little
boron, apparently by no right at all, flaunts a heat of combustion that is sec-
ond only to that of hydrogen and actually superior to that of carbon (pp.
245-46). Silicon is both fit and unfit; and so is the compound, ammonia (p.
263). Nitrogen is a good element but not good enough to be numbered among
the "fittest." And there are other devastating evidences of anti- teleology. If
the three superior elements prove that teleology is the order of nature, why do
some eighty inferior elements exist at all?
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 369
ment or property, or a fortiori what group of elements or properties
he would care to name as not being unique. Nor is the case any
better, as it happens, when he comes to what he calls the " abstract"
and "changeless" properties of substances. 13 Each of these is differ-
ent from the others and is therefore unique. But if this concept
is easy of application it is by the same token of very slight signifi-
cance. Yet Professor Henderson reiterates the word "unique"
with an unction, so to speak, as if it reinforced or advanced his
argument.
And here we must leave for a moment the locus of concepts for
the field of (psychology. Why, for Professor Henderson, has the
colorless predicate "unique" become in some sense encomiastic and
salutary to his purpose? Simply, I think, because his selected
elements and properties are "fit" and important ones; that is why
he selected .them; and he likes them; and therefore he is pleased
and not a little impressed on discovering that they are unique. It
is by the same emotional mechanism that every furniture dealer has
the "most unique" specimen of Old Colonial, and every mother
the "best" baby on earth (the superlative case being seized upon by
the vulgar under the same tension of feeling). The adjective "phe-
nomenal," through the same mechanism, has been so abused as to
be, in all save scientific contexts, worthless. Few of us are suffi-
ciently I'homme intellectuel not to note with elation that our own
geese are "unique" as compared to other persons' swans.
The term "unique" must be expunged from Professor Hender-
son's argument. It is purely rhetorical and has no legitimate func-
tion to fulfil there: and, like other forms of unremoved refuse, is
likely to provide breeding points for germs of error. Thus the
statement, "that the properties of hydrogen, carbon, and oxygen
make up a unique ensemble of properties, each one of which is
itself unique, ' ' 14 when purged of emotional warmth, becomes a state-
ment that is less likely to overawe and to mislead; viz., that the
properties of hydrogen, carbon, and oxygen make up an ensemble of
properties, each one of which is. Any mechanist will assent to this.
II.
2. Maxima and Minima. "Bach of these properties [of the
three elements] is almost or quite unique, either because it has a
maximum or a minimum value [the minimal value of some proper-
ties determines of course maximal "fitness"] or nearly so, among
is I am aware of a certain error that Professor Henderson could make in
self-defense at this point by appealing to his scholastic realism. But rather
than complicate the argument here, I shall wait to see if he makes it.
PMl. Bev., 1916, XXV., p. 268.
370 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
all known substances, or because it involves a unique relationship
or an anomaly." 15 The terms "maximum" and "minimum" are
here used correctly, and indeed their proper locus is all .but un>
mistakable. This is the end terms of a series of objects which are
serially ordered according to the magnitudes of some one property
or quality possessed by all the objects.
We should notice here that the fact that the maximal values
of Professor Henderson's teleological properties are not distributed
at random among the eighty odd elements, but do accumulate (as
"modes") on carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, is one that may well
interest us. lie calls this fact the "pattern;" and I shall revert
to the pattern later. These three modes are interesting, of course,
just as any pronounced empirical modes are interesting. But if he
supposes that they are "teleologically" interesting, as he does, this
is only because the properties so plotted are the "teleological," the
"fit," properties which he originally selected.
Although the loci of "maximum" and "minimum" are all but
unmistakable, yet even here human ingenuity can find out the way
of error. In speaking of the pattern Professor Henderson says:
"This order has for cosmic and organic evolution extremely im-
portant results maximum stability of physico-chemical conditions
and maximum complexity in the physico-chemical make-up of the
surface of our planet ; further, the possibility of maximum number,
variety, complexity, durability and activity of physico-chemical
systems in such an environment. ... No other environment . . . could
so highly favor. . . . This environment is indeed the fittest." 16 In
other words because three very common elements possess many
properties each of which is favorable to the formation of diverse
systems (while some eighty other elements do not possess these ad-
vantages), Professor Henderson concludes that just this concen-
trated distribution of these properties is the most favorable to their
maximal cooperation in the evolution of the universe. This is a
leap in the dark such as Professor Henderson may expect of any
metaphysician, but which no metaphysician would expect of Pro-
fessor Henderson. For the most elementary experience teaches that
when properties are combined the strangest things happen to their
maxima and minima in the combined function. Properties are not
in general simply additive ; and still less so are maxima and minima.
But if they were, a fitter universe would of course be one in which
wPfcfl. Bev., 1916, XXV., p. 267. The first use of " unique 7 ' in this pas-
sage is of course fallacious; it unwarrantably restricts the locus by implying
that only the two end members of a series of different objects are unique; or
again that only an " anomaly" ie unique. The second use is correct but idle.
The vicious effect of the term is readily perceived.
Eev., 1916, XXV., p. 269.
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 371
all of the participating elements possessed what are at present the
maximal fitnesses.
I am not sure that the problem thus raised is one that can be
even stated in rigorous scientific form. But the difficulties besetting
Professor Henderson's path at this point will be sufficiently illus-
trated by a single consideration. It is a familiar fact in chemistry
that the more complex substances are in general the less stable.
And certainly the "complexity" and the "activity" of physico-
chemical systems are in some measure at least (if not diametrically)
opposed to their "durability." Now apart from the two minor
questions: what distribution of component properties each in a
general way maximally favorable to the activity of systems will be
maximally favorable to the activity of the system in which they are
combined, and the parallel question respecting durability; there is
the further and more serious question, what degree and distribution
of activity and what degree and distribution of durability will
make for the maximum success of the evolutionary process. Heat
favors chemical activity, and water, excellent solvent, favors chem-
ical activity, but the system which tried to combine the greatest
amount of heat with the greatest amount of water would not be the
"fittest" for either activity or evolution. For there is a degree of
heat that destroys water, and much else. These questions, if they
are soluble at all, are staggeringly intricate. I do not discover
that Professor Henderson has considered them.
In terms, once more, of the locus of "maximum" and "min-
imum," the objection which I raise is that the maxima and minima
of component functions can not be simply added to give the maxima
and minima of the combined function.
3. Chance, Probability, and Possibility. The notion of "possi-
bility" has been implicitly involved in our preceding argument.
For the question whether a different distribution of their properties
would more conduce to "cosmic and organic evolution" means
"different from the actual" in both cases. It is equivalent to ask-
ing whether other arrangements could be a better "preparation for
the evolutionary process." If not, the actual arrangement is the
best possible. And in fact a comparison with other "possibilities"
is everywhere involved in Professor Henderson's argument. This
is often explicitly stated, as in the following sentence. "Given
matter, energy, and the resulting necessity that life shall be a
mechanism, the conclusion follows that the atmosphere of solid
bodies does actually provide the best of all possible environments
for life." 17
Now the loci of those concepts which involve any species of
IT Fitness, p. 273.
372 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
potentiality are perhaps the most difficult and most frequently mis-
understood of all. And a complete treatment of them would in-
volve the theory of cognition itself, for there is no "potentiality"
except in a situation where a cognizer is making some sort of fore-
cast. But this would go 'beyond our present compass, and for the
case in hand a briefer treatment will suffice.
In Professor Henderson's use of "possibility" he contemplates,
or essays to contemplate, all of the "possible," which is to say the
thinkable, permutations of arrangement among the actually ob-
served properties of elements and their compounds. This is a free
and gratuitous act of the imagination, save only that the properties
thus imaginatively permuted are, severally, actual properties. It
is comparable to a child conceiving of a mountain of sweets the
biggest mountain, the sweetest sweets, and the least conducive to
stomach-ache. But such imaginative permutations of entities, al-
though each entity be a real, notoriously leads one to more im-
possibles than possibles. And a free sweep of the imagination is
not the true locus of the concept "possibility."
It is, however, from this that tihe concept has evolved. After
the pictorial imagination has run its course the criterion needed, in
order to separate the possibles from the impossibles, is this which,
now, of these alleged "possibles" can be done; which can be con-
cretely realized ? With this a notion of causation and of the manip-
ulation, or else of the spontaneous cooperation, of actual causes to
produce concretely one or more out of the many imagined effects,
enters into the locus. If it is the spontaneous cooperation of causes
producing this end, wfhich we envisage, we here branch off into the
nearby field of "chance" and "probability." If it is the manip-
ulation, by ourselves or others, then it next appears that one does
not know, sensu strictiori, which of the alleged possibles can be
realized until one has realized it But with that the "possible"
becomes an actual. Clearly the locus of "possibility" stops some-
where short of this.
It does, but at a point which is not defined by logical, but by
merely psychological, considerations. Thus a human element of
caprice, conjecture, belief or faith more or less accepted by the
crowd inheres in the notion of "possibility." It is irremediably a
psychological, and more or less a social, concept. Its locus is not
sharply defined because the degree of plausibility or expectation
required to make an effect "possible" is fixed by no convention. It
increases with the advance and diffusion of knowledge; it varies
from one social group to another. 18 For some persons conversation
is In studying the locus of concepts one must not forget that they are
undergoing evolution. As compared with some concepts, that of ll possibility M
is in a state of ' ' active mutation. ' '
PSTCHOLOGT AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 373
with departed spirits is "possible;" for others a forecast of the
weather or the commission of a voluntary act is "impossible." For
these, and several other, reasons the concept of "possibility" has no
proper place in science. 19 It is, however, often enough used by
scientists, but generally only after some consideration at least of
real causes that have in other circumstances produced' the imagined
effects, or effects very similar; of the accessibility of the causes to
actual manipulation ; etc., etc. Of such cautions I discover no trace
in Professor Henderson's argument. 120 The "possible," yet so much
less "fit" or desirable, other permutations of the properties of ele-
ments and their compounds are the free creations of his imaginative
faculty. And when one is considering such fundamental matters
as the properties of substances one knows too little of their ante-
cedent causes to be able to speak circumspectly about what were
"possible." This fact applies even more significantly in connection
with Professor Henderson's use of "chance" and "probability."
This unique ensemble, he says, can not have come about by
chance: "the possibility is negligible that conditions equally favor-
able to the production of diversity in the course of evolution should
arise without cause."- 1 And again, "There is, in truth, not one
chance in countless millions of millions that the many unique
properties of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, and especially of their
stable compounds water and carbonic acid, . . . should simultaneously
occur in the three elements otherwise than through the operation of
a natural law which somehow connects them together." 22 The up-
shot of which is, "that the connection between the properties of the
three elements and the evolutionary process is teleological and non-
mechanical. ' ' 28
In this application of "chance" Professor Henderson makes
two errors either of which would be fatal. The least situation in
which chance can be spoken of is: two (or more) causal sequences,
and an observing computing organism ; further, the causal sequences
i It may be that f ew persons will agree with this assertion. But I should
be willing to go still further, and assert that no on of the potentiality concepts
finds any proper employment in science: that tihe work of science is but imper-
fectly accomplished until all scientific propositions have been reduced to the
indicative mood. All equations are, of course, in this mood.
20 An ambitious student would find in Professor Henderson 'a writings cap-
ital material for a doctorial thesis on the concept of possibility; for which he
might select the captivating title, ' ' What would the Universe be like if it were
other than it is?"
21 Phil. Eev., 1916, XXV., p. 271. The mechanist believes that nothing arises
"without cause."
22 Fitness, p. 276.
23 Phil. Eev., loc. tit., p. 278. Throughout this stage of his argument Pro-
fessor Henderson uses the notions of chance and probability in a way that I am
bound to call reckless.
374 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
are relatively independent, but they are about to interact, or meet;
further, the observer knows this but owing to the relative apartness
of the causes he is able to deduce or predict only very imperfectly
some features of the expected interaction: these unpredictable
features he declares to be "subject to chance." Nothing less than
this is the locus of that concept, and essential to its legitimate appli-
cation. In the old illustration of the 'die, the shape and homo-
geneous composition of the die, its relation to gravity, and the
quality etc. of the table top may be taken as one causal sequence;
the original (and unknown) lie of the die in the box derives from
another causal sequence; the movements of the shaker's arm, and
the relation of this to the table top, are a third causal sequence.
In the die when it finally comes to rest on the table these three
sequences have met. The number that comes "up" was unpre-
dictable, and the fact that it comes up is ascribed to "chance" by
the person who was interested but could predict only that some
number would lie uppermost. The instant that the causal sequences
have met and the die rests on the table, the locus for chance has ex-
pired. And obviously, "chance" is another psychological concept
it involves in its very locus a knower.
Now, first, when Professor Henderson speaks of "countless mil-
lions of millions" of chances, he is either (1) thinking of a many-
faceted die (or some comparable mechanism) with all the properties
of all the elements and their compounds inscribed each on a facet,
no facet remaining 'blank; and this die is shaken countless millions
of millions of times. And he has no right to such an assumption.
Or (2) he is not thinking of a die, is making his permutations men-
tally (by the mathematician's handy method of syncopation), 24 and
again he has not got the locus of chance those real but unpredict-
able causal sequences that are to meet. Both objections reduce to
the fact mentioned above, i. e., that we know too little of the causes
that lie behind the properties of matter to envisage even the situ-
ation, the locus of chance.
Secondly, Professor Henderson argues that after one actual
arrangement of the properties has been selected by nature from the
countless millions of millions of arrangements which he alleges to
be "possible," the chance of tliis arrangement coming out was very,
very small. Is Professor Henderson unaware that after the event
there is no "chance"? Or, in other words, that the "chance" of
any event that has actually taken place is exactly equal to unity?
Professor Henderson, in the quality of "man of science" and
doubtless rightly enough, heartily despises the "philosopher," yet
24 The same syncopation that leads to the "completed infinite," and other
paradoxes.
PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS 375
I think, if he will consider a bit analytically the current scientific
notions of chance and probability, that he will find some neat little
antinomies that may call to mind glass houses. One of these
antinomies is that any event before it happens has a vanishingly
small chance ; while after it happens, it had always been certain to
happen, had always had the probability one. Such pitfalls can be
avoided only by observing very carefully what the true locus of
chance is. And any one who does this will soon find that there is
neither chance nor probability "in nature," and also, perhaps, that
a theory which purports to enable us to cash in our ignorance, to
predict where we can not foresee, needs some revision. Portions of
the theory of probability are among the modern scientist's last re-
maining forms of magic.
III.
4. Preparation. "Hence we are obliged to regard the proper-
ties as in some intelligible sense a preparation for the process of
planetary evolution. . . . But we are ignorant of the existence of any
cause except the mind which can thus produce results that are fully
intelligible only in their relation to later events." 25 "In short, we
are face to face with the problem of design." I take "refuge in
the vaguest possible term which can be employed'. That term is
teleology." 26 In another place Professor Henderson refers to
"teleology" as "the vaguest possible term which can be imagined,
from which all implication of design or purpose has 'been com-
pletely eliminated." 27
Now "preparation" is of course inalienably a psychological con-
cept: it presupposes a preparer who is looking ahead or, as indeed
Professor Henderson perceives, a mind. But now this "prepara-
tion" he rechristens "teleology," and then lightly asserts that from
"teleology" "all implication of design or purpose has been com-
pletely eliminated." I submit that this is a very pretty case of
wresting a word from its locus, its meaning. Of course the word
".teleology" his now become printer's ink.
But it was in 1917 that Professor Henderson took this step. In
1916 he wrote as follows: "Here it may be pointed 1 out that bio-
logical organization consists in a teleological and non-mechanical
relationship between mechanical things and processes. In both
cases the relationship is rational and non-mechanical, the things
related mechanical and non-rational. Or, in other words, the rela>-
tion is an affair of the reflective judgment, the things related of the
determinate judgment. It is the failure to understand this dis-
. Eev., 1916, XXV., p. 271.
., p. 278.
a? The Order of Nature, 1917, p. 204.
376 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
tinction which is at the bottom of most misunderstandings con-
cerning teleological problems in biology." 28 Now whether Pro-
fessor Henderson intended it or not, this capitally states the locus
of "teleology." The teleological relation is an affair of the re-
flective judgment, of Professor Henderson's reflective judgment.
And if he, and others like-minded, cease to reflect in this vein,
there is no teleology save the meaningless printed word scattered
here and there through 'books. It is merely the human judgment
that imputes to the pattern of the properties this "fitness," this
"quality of preparation." The pattern is merely what it is.
" 'Why,' " as Professor H. C. Brown has said, "taken teleolog-
ically, has meaning only in the responses of the conscious organism
where ideas, as anticipations, become motives and determine them.
It is not the universe, but only certain organisms that have a struc-
ture making such ideal anticipations possible." 29 And as Professor
H. C. Warren has said; "In short, the arguments so far advanced
for 'peculiar fitness' lead merely to the meaningless conclusion that
the fitness of things is what it is. ... If the action of a directing
agency during the course of events is unsupported by evidence,
there is no a priori ground for assuring [assuming 1 ?] such a directive
agency at the beginning of events." 30 And again, "while we may
conclude, on the basis of empirical evidence, that 'history' in its
widest sense shows a trend, our present scientific knowledge does
not indicate that it manifests a purpose." 81 No, the "purpose" is
injected by the private "reflective judgment" Which, in an ex-
uberant moment, is sometimes led to marvel at the beautiful way in
which events "prepare" for what is to come; or again, at the
beautiful way in which they "fulfill the promise" of what has gone
before. The correlative notions of preparation and fulfilment are
both the work of the non-scientific imagination.
5. Changelessness. "Nothing is more certain than that the
properties of hydrogen, carbon, and oxygen are changeless through-
out time and space. It is conceivable that the atoms may be formed
and that they may decay. But while they exist they are uni-
form." 32 "Accordingly, the properties of the elements are to be
regarded as fully determined and perfe 
